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The Storage Management Impact on Technology and Business
The mainframe information storage management conundrum is as familiar as it is evolving. New devices and technologies are constantly added and acquisitions often occur, making the ever-changing environment in dire need of tools that are flexible and often can be scaled to the specific requirements of an organization.
Moreover, corporate data is critical to the operation of the business, and therefore, must be protected at all costs. Data loss is simply unacceptable, rendering a disaster of any size potentially catastrophic. Thus, technologies that support optimal strategies must be implemented post haste.
TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES
According to the Butler Group, mainframe processing power is being shipped at record levels, with approximately 70 percent of organizations and governments running critical applications on these resources.1 Meanwhile, the reality of today’s business environment has redefined the role of IT professionals and forced them to become integral parts of the business, rather than a reactive service organization.
IT staff are continually asked to “do more with less” and face the challenge of managing more storage in the future with no added headcount. They are also chartered to institute process efficiencies to safeguard data, while continually optimizing resources and improving utilization. In order to stay ahead, organizations need to be able to prevent problems before they cause interruption to the business. And, the need for fast access to data is increasingly critical. But, organizations often acquire varying technologies over time to address these requirements, and as a result, eventually look to somehow standardize and consolidate their tools. When it takes the bold step toward storage management unification, IT is ultimately concerned with reducing the need to master diverse methodologies, formats and syntaxes and their related impacts. And this, in turn, is about infusing cost efficiency and effectiveness.***
Today more than ever, there is a real need to manage risk, improve service, manage costs and align IT investments with the needs of the business. And as such, ongoing storage initiatives must effectively control stored data and its supporting infrastructure simply and efficiently, enabling the close integration of storage with constantly changing business requirements. Improving operational efficiency while managing growing z/OS data with level or decreased personnel is paramount to the success of today’s storage management staff. Meanwhile, end users continually look for productivity gains through:
- Ease-of-use
- Common look and feel
- Shared services for disparate z/OS storage products
- Real storage automation — orchestrating essential storage processes
And these multiple end-user concerns are further complicated by the plethora of high-level business drivers influencing all business decisions, including:
- Business continuity
- Compliance
- Cost reduction
Thus, the storage administrator’s contribution to business continuity is one of managing complex storage environments, maximizing use of existing storage resources and ensuring protection and high availability of applications and business information to the point that data is accessible no matter where it resides in the storage hierarchy or geography. Compliance expansion continues as corporate policies and government regulations converge and extend into all facets of organizational life. With regard to storage management, the need to deliver effective control of business information to meet regulations and corporate policies grows daily.
Finally, investment protection is a constant challenge, with overarching technology practices requiring the reduction of future costs by building on existing infrastructure and eliminating the need to rip and replace. To that aim, storage administrators are exploring vendor-neutral management software that is efficient, open, easy to install, configure and use and runs on any z/OS-supported hardware.
THE COMBINED SOLUTION
All told, these challenges mean organizations need to simplify major storage management disciplines and operations. And to do so, they are looking at automating monitoring and analysis of their entire storage management environment and infrastructures. The reason? A unified approach helps reduce costs and operations by streaming overall administration, which, in turn, maximizes use of existing storage resources and ensures protection and high availability of business-critical applications and information.
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