Storage Management: Simplify, Simplify

By Tom Schmidt

Today's IT managers face no shortage of challenges. One of the thorniest challenges involves managing storage in heterogeneous data centers.

In the area of storage and server management alone, managing the complexity created by heterogeneous server and storage platforms can require upwards of 50 tools in a large data center.

But here's the paradox: The complexity confronting IT managers may be growing significantly, but IT budgets and other resources aren't keeping pace. A recent CIO Insight survey found that almost two-thirds of CIOs surveyed weren't facing flat IT budgets. They were facing shrinking IT budgets.

The truth is that CIOs and IT departments are being asked to do more with less. Not only that, they are being tasked with keeping the business up and running while also implementing new capabilities and technologies that enable the enterprise to pursue new opportunities.

That's a tall order any way you look at it.

Reducing the complexity

The complexity of today's heterogeneous IT environments also makes disruptions inevitable. Disruptions to business services can be caused by any number of factors, including operator errors, power failures, poorly configured systems, and cyberattacks that exploit software vulnerabilities. Building an environment that is completely resistant to disruption is impossible. Instead, companies can choose to manage and mitigate risk and preserve their business continuity by building a resilient infrastructure. After all, the real disaster isn't to lose data -- it's not being able to recover it.

The challenge, then, is to create an environment that not only is easier to manage but, at the same time, runs on every operating system platform. That way, an enterprise gets greater flexibility and control with respect to the server and OS platforms that it chooses to run today and in the future.

There are benefits to be had in utilizing common software to manage multiple platforms in the data center. Among the benefits are:

• Simplified processes
• Easier to run and manage
• Increased productivity and efficiency
• Increased availability and uptime
• Reduced employee training costs

Managing more efficiently

Increasingly, enterprises are turning to centralized storage and server management solutions to help simplify the administration and management of their heterogeneous environments by automating them, while also improving performance and ensuring availability. Centralized management from a single console lets administrators manage larger data backups faster and more efficiently. Such solutions can also provide:

• Continuous data protection The CIO and the IT department are charged with keeping the business up, running, and growing. When disruptions do occur, they need to get the enterprise restarted and restored to the "moment before" state as rapidly as possible. Of course, protecting data at the headquarters and main data center is challenging enough. For data located in remote offices and on employee laptops, where exposure and risk are higher, IT administrators need even greater vigilance and solutions that are effective in any situation.
• Disk-based recovery End users have little time or patience for extended data recovery operations, so administrators must be able to recover data quickly. Disk-based recovery technology offers higher performance than tape backup, and is  a more practical approach that maximizes data availability to end users. The result is less downtime, increased application availability, and more efficient use of storage devices, all of which reduces the total cost of ownership.
• Simplified management As administrators become responsible for more data located on more resources around the enterprise, they need management solutions that are efficient as well as effective. Administrators should be able to manage and monitor multiple Backup Exec servers from a single console across their organizations.
• Help with complex regulatory compliance A centralized solution can protect organizations from legal exposure by blocking inappropriate file types from being stored on corporate resources. It can also enable administrators to reclaim premium disk space and reduce storage growth by ensuring that only business-appropriate files are being stored and backed up, thereby streamlining regulatory compliance.

Conclusion

Storage administrators are struggling to manage more data with smaller backup windows and fewer resources than ever before. Indeed, large, distributed networks with remote offices and multiple media servers are now the norm.

At the highest level, a centralized storage and server management solution enables maximum utilization of existing server hardware and storage from multiple vendors by controlling application placement across large numbers of server nodes. Organizations can achieve higher availability, higher utilization, greater productivity, and reduced management costs throughout their environment.

On a larger scale, managing an increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environment amid today's digital threats calls for a flexible, agile foundation to run and store critical information. And it demands a broader view of how to integrate security and availability.

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