Storage Operations Management:
There is a holistic storage-management trend taking place in companies today. IT groups are acknowledging that storage should become part of the network. What businesses are finally seeing is that storage is not an isolated island, or a group of isolated islands, but part of a holistic management domain.
As a result, storage operations management software has become a critical piece of the IT puzzle. Today, customers are looking for storage solutions that control the entire operations network and optimize all of their storage resources via a single console, not just through a myriad of point solutions.
Today most organizations license, support and manage multiple software tools for all of their individual components and resources in the storage environment adding unnecessary complexity. To reach the returns promised by networked storage, organizations must deploy one integrated platform that manages and simplifies the complete distributed storage environment.
Storage Operations Management
The umbrella term Storage Operations Management (SOM) identifies several layers of management that not only entails storage resource management, but also elements of storage network management, storage performance, storage services, security, database operations management and backup operations management (Figure 1). A SOM solution is a single, comprehensive storage management platform that addresses all four critical metrics that gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of a networked storage environment: storage efficiency, operations efficiency, infrastructure TCO and business agility. The foundation of a storage operations management solution is policy, workflow and automation which enables application focused, end-to-end management of the networked storage environment.
A storage operations management solution simplifies, stabilizes, and secures the storage management process by enabling the visualization and control of the network storage environment. Implementing a SOM solution, organizations can achieve dramatic reductions in capital and administrative costs while at the same time improving service levels to their users by optimizing storage resource components, centralizing administration, and managing the complexity of distributed storage network operations.
From a central management console, a Storage operations management solution will allow the storage administrators to monitor and manage storage and storage service availability, performance, usage, cost, and growth. In turn, this will help the organization optimize its informational assets and enhance business performance while dramatically reducing capital and operating costs.
An optimal storage operations management solution must meet each of the following six critical criteria:
1. Based on policy, workflow and automation. These three core components provide intelligence and manageability to the entire networked storage environment.
2. Optimize multiple variables simultaneously: storage efficiency, operations efficiency, infrastructure TCO and business agility. If only one or two of these variables are optimize the result may, in-fact, be decreased business agility.
3. Operate without any device or vendor dependencies. If the software needs one particular vendor's device, or runs on a proprietary appliance, then it is a closed, proprietary solution.
4. Maintain a core architecture that is flexible and independent of a single server operating system.
5. Manage across the enterprise and not be limited by platform or device functionality. This includes the management support for DAS, SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel and IP technologies.
6. Function out of the data path. The SOM solution must be an extremely low risk proposition to the production environment by managing outside of the data path. This out-of-band management is crucial to ensure the highest levels of application performance and availability with the lowest levels of risk and exposure.
Storage Operations Efficiency
Analysts estimate that there is significant underutilized or unused storage in both direct-attached and network-attached environments. Discovering and reclaiming this capacity can rapidly lead to a direct savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars. There also is the potential to discover significant amounts of "orphaned" storage. This includes existing storage assets that have been assigned in the array, zoned, LUNed mapped and presented to the volume manager but never tied to an application.
Discovering significant amounts of such orphaned or stranded storage is one of the benefits of a SOM solution. These types of benefits result from the automated, policy-based management of applications and their storage requirements which allow a storage administrator, through a workflow, to simplify and secure the management of the networked storage environment.
