Managed Storage Services

Storage of information is one of the most critical tasks for any
organization. Add government and company regulations regarding retention of old
data to this, and you create a heady mix for the IT department. Besides these
difficulties, it is also extremely difficult to figure out storage requirements
in future. For eg, one can never assess what would be storage requirements
related to web trends, projects in development or pending business alliances.
Providing cost-effective, secure, scalable and reliable storage infrastructure
is very difficult to achieve. As data is generated every moment in
organizations, in the form of emails, documents, databases, etc, storage needs
are also increasing with time and lot of IT resources are consumed in managing
storage related activities. Research has shown that cost of managing storage, on
an average is three to five times higher than the cost of purchasing it. To
overcome these difficulties and to let organizations focus on their core
business, plus to make storage more cost effective, Managed Storage Services are
becoming popular and coming up as a great alternative to conventional storage
management.

Storage management modes and their benefits

Significant contributors to storage in an organization include emails and
the various databases that link to key business applications like ERP, CRM and
SCM. Backup and recovery of such data is high on the priority list for any IT
department. The storage solutions used by organizations to store their data are
broadly classified as network storage solutions. The most common amongst these
are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) along with
connectivity options (Fiber channel etc). By outsourcing storage services, one
can efficiently provide and manage all data storage related activities and
services, as most vendors who offer Managed Storage Services are experts in this
domain There are two different ways of implementing Managed Storage Services. If
you are starting a new branch, organizations can completely outsource their
storage infrastructure and services. This implies organizations don't have to
invest in storage infrastructure, they just pay for service like any other
utility bill (fixed amount per Gigs of storage). This also helps new branches to
be functional quickly. Other way of implementing Managed Storage Services is via
remote management, here the managed service provider remotely manages storage
activities and devices sitting inside your premises. Some benefits of using
Managed Storage Services include: a customized and flexible solution with
best-of-breed facilities like continuous performance monitoring, end-to-end
problem management, change management, real time response to additional storage
needs and comprehensive reporting.

Additional services include backup and restore, information strategy
development, infrastructure assessment, storage consolidation and total cost of
ownership studies, interoperability testing, data migration, capacity planning,
cabling, configuration, installation, and multi-vendor maintenance services.

Security of data

As mentioned earlier, information management is very critical for an
organization, and leakage of data can completely break business processes and
reputation of an organization. Under Managed Storage Services, one has to put
this critical data under service providers' control. Moreover, as the service
provider is at different geographical locations, movement of data over a public
network further adds to security concerns. So, we should focus on techniques
that enable secure data transfer. Some of them are as under:

SAN Zoning

Arranging Fiber Channel devices into logical groups or zones is known as SAN
Zoning. Only devices that are in the same zone can recognize and communicate
with each other through switched port-to-port connections.

A hard zone is implemented within the Fiber Channel switches and consists of
two or more port switch/port definitions. Effectively, the addition of ports to
a hard zone creates an isolated point-to-point tunnel. A soft zone consists of a
list of World Wide Port Names (WWPNs) that uniquely identify the Fiber Channel
Host Bus Adapter (HBA) within the customer servers and the storage subsystems.

When an HBA is first connected to the SAN fabric, it goes through a fabric
login process that uses the burned-in WWPN of the HBA to uniquely identify the
adapter to the SAN fabric. The WWPN within the Fiber Channel switches are unique
and cannot be changed.

LUN masking

A LUN (Logical Unit Number) is a logical unit number assigned to a logical
disk image within a storage subsystem. LUNs are associated with customer servers
via the WWPN of the HBA within the customer server. LUN Masking is an
authorization process that makes a LUN available to some hosts and unavailable
to others. LUN Masking dictates which hosts can see logical disks within a zone.

Host access by port

Host access by port is implemented within a storage subsystem that contains
multiple HBAs. The storage subsystem maintains a table that indicates which HBA
ports a given customer server must connect through to gain access to the LUNs.
Host access by port, in combination with SAN zoning, effectively defines a
point-to-point path through the SAN fabric from the customer server to the
logical resources within the storage subsystems.

Port binding

Port binding is implemented by defining the WWPN that may log into a
specific port. All ports in the fabric will have a WWPN, which is assigned port
by port. A null value will be entered for ports that are not utilized, thereby
preventing any unauthorized login access to the fabric. Invalid login attempts
on ports will send an alert.

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Managed Data Center Services