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Managing Storage

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The data belonging to any organization grows by leaps and bounds every year, whether it’s ordinary documents, databases, or even e-mail. This growth increases the need to purchase more storage equipment to store the data, and given the number of options available today, it’s not an easy task to decide what to buy. Even after you decide, the increase in the amount of storage equipment poses a challenge to manage it. Storage management has, therefore, become a serious issue in most organizations today. Let’s first look at where the issues crop up, and then the approach being used to handle them. 

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Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization is the latest mantra in the large-enterprise storage market. It’s an evolution of SAN that pools different storage devices, even those spread over different geographical locations to form a unified virtual storage disk using special software and hardware. It offers better data integrity, redundancy and fault—tolerance than SAN, at the same time not using expensive proprietary storage. You can add storage devices from multiple vendors making it highly scalable. Of course, all these advantages will be only as good as your network. HP, EMC, Sun, Network Appliances, IBM and Hitachi are the major players in this arena.



Adoption of industry-wide standards and protocols are, however, yet to happen. For now, individual vendors are busy promoting their respective products even though a couple of important initiatives are on. For more details, see PCQuest February 2003, page 30 (www.pcquest.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?arid=42762&way=search).

There was a time when the file server was the king of any network. It was central to the network, and all nodes would religiously login to it and store all their data in it. There would be a network operating system running on it, which would create user accounts and home directories for each employee to store their individual data. Then to protect this data, there would be some sort of a tape backup mechanism setup with the file server. Those days are now over, and the file server has become just another citizen of the network. The data now resides in many other locations. For one, since the per GB cost of hard drive storage has reduced significantly, every node on the network, be it desktop or laptop has sufficient storage space. Then there’s the proliferation of servers–an unending list of database, e-mail, knowledge management, groupware, ERP, CRM, application servers, etc, all of which hold data in different forms. As the organization grows, the data on these servers grows, and so does the need for more storage equipment grow. 

The challenges



The options an organization has for storage equipment can be divided into three parts: DAS, NAS and SAN. Within these, there are a multitude of options to choose from. We’ll not delve into their explanation here as they’ve already been dealt with in a separate article. What we want to stress on here is that in addition to the extra cost you would incur for the new storage equipment, you would also increase your administrative overheads. It may require additional operating skills, which may not be present within the existing manpower. This would increase your training and manpower costs.

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Also, as the storage infrastructure becomes more complex, simple backup procedures won’t be sufficient. You’ll need to frame new policies and modify existing ones. For instance, a simple move from a DAS to a NAS device would change the way data is accessed, backed up and restored. Similarly, adding a SAN would help to consolidate your storage into one place, but increase management tasks as it consists of diverse equipment ranging from disk arrays, the Fibre-Channel network, switches, host bus adapters, etc. So, different devices would have their own software for management, which would require time to operate and learn. 

The solution



If you have a large storage infrastructure, you would need to have a proper strategy to manage it. One approach to do this is called Storage Resource Management or SRM. Its main objectives are to improve storage capacity utilization, availability and performance. It uses software to ensure that all data is accessible and the quality of service is maintained from the underlying storage hardware. So, it would keep track of all the storage hardware devices on the network, continuously monitor their activity, and ensure that the most frequently accessed data is kept readily available, while infrequently used data is stored. It would monitor unused space in the storage, and try to optimize its usage so that the storage is not over or under allocated. This can help reduce wastage and save the cost of purchasing more equipment. By keeping track of the various parameters, SRM also aims to improve your storage strategies and device new policies. You don’t need to hop from one software to another to manage your storage. For instance, your tape library would have its own management interface, while the DAS device would have its own. Whenever you need to manage their data, you’ll have to open their management consoles separately to work on them. SRM aims to give a common interface for managing most of the storage hardware. Major software vendors like IBM and CA have SRM software. Whether you need SRM or not depends upon how big is your existing storage infrastructure and how much are you spending on its maintenance. So take stock of the equipment you have, and the manpower used to handle it. Then check whether investing in an SRM package would help you better utilize the equipment and reduce additional purchase. For instance, SRM might be able to provide you with information about your storage, but may not be able to take any action on it. For that you may still have to use the underlying management software for the specific hardware. 

Anil Chopra

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