Increasing Control in the Storage Environment

By Tom Schmidt

A pundit once said that the goal of IT is threefold: to be invisible, to deliver whatever the business requires and to provide IT as a service. Unfortunately, the reality of IT is rather more mundane, as any IT professional knows. One might say that the reality of IT is fourfold:

• Growth is constant
• Change is constant
• There's never enough time or money
• There's no opportunity to be strategic when there are tactical fires to be fought all day, every day

So how do we break out of this impasse? How, in other words, do we make the reality look more like the goal? According to Steve Duplessie, an analyst with The Enterprise Strategy Group, we can start by recognizing the vital importance of resource management.

"Resource management is not a 'nice to have,'" he said recently. "It is mandatory if you ever want to hope to break the cycle of doom. How can you make decisions on what you need to do until you are armed with the facts of where you are today?"

Going further, Duplessie argues that "nothing strategic will ever occur inside IT until we get an exact understanding of what we have for physical infrastructure -- and what applications and business units it is tied to. We also need an exact understanding of what data is on what infrastructure, and how it is treated."

This article looks at some of the barriers that have prevented resource management tools from being widely implemented. It then describes a resource management solution that can help increase control in the storage environment.

Cost and complexity
Traditionally, says Duplessie, there have been two primary barriers to implementing resource management tools: cost and the complexity of installing and using the tools. But today those obstacles are being overcome.

"Resource management is essentially free," he says. "The cost will be more than made up for by reclaiming infrastructure assets, enabling intelligent decision making about policy moving forward, and by being able to scale IT operations people."

As for complexity, "adding this class of tool is no longer burdensome," Duplessie says. "Agents get pushed out, auto-discover, and report results the way you want to see them. You don't need full time people to make this work for you. You don't even need part-time people. This isn't your grandfather's resource management."

He continues: "In the best run shops I know, resource management still shows huge surprises. It will spot errors you could only hope to stumble upon otherwise. Resource management is the foundation to ever being able to really build a service-oriented infrastructure."

The storage dilemma
Today, storage costs typically represent anywhere from 10% to 20% of a company's total IT hardware expenditure. Although the price of storage is decreasing approximately 25% annually, it has been estimated that the average company's compounded annual growth rate for data is 55%, which leaves an overall net increase in storage spending. IT thus finds itself in the position of having to justify why so much money is being spent on storage when the IT budget is supposed to be flat or declining.

To compensate for the increasing net costs of storage, IT has adopted many of the technologies that promise to make more efficient utilization of storage assets, such as: NAS, SAN and iSCSI. In addition, they have bought into many of the hardware vendors' strategies that promise to help them decrease storage costs, such as utility storage, tiered storage and ILM. But for most companies, the net effect of chasing cost-effective storage has been that the underlying IT infrastructure becomes incredibly complex.

What's needed is a storage resource management solution that provides highly centralized control across heterogeneous storage environments. A highly centralized approach to managing storage increases the accountability of IT organizations to meet the storage needs of a diverse set of applications for the various organizations being served.

Conclusion
With budgets decreasing and storage requirements increasing, the need for better storage management is apparent. The decision to implement a storage resource management solution, however, isn't one that should be taken lightly. While the rewards can be significant, so too can the up-front effort required to accomplish the vision. Storage resource management is more than technology; it's also dependent on how the organization drives the business, manages the information and uses that information to make better business decisions. Ultimately, the desired result of such a solution is to enable IT to deliver storage services to the businesses that are measurable, accountable and tightly integrated with enterprise objectives.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.