In an ideal world, everything would be the opposite. We'd like storage to be cheaper to buy and to run. In fact, we'd rather the storage ran itself once we gave it some guidelines about what to store and how much money and effort to spend storing it.
"Where storage really ends up is a service that gets provisioned and managed by policy and people just start plugging into it like you do the network," says Kevin McIsaac, research director at industry analyst the META Group. "It's probably going to take until about 2010 to be at that level-just a utility in the datacentre."
Vendors may argue the point endlessly, but when it comes down to the basics, storage has become a commodity. But commoditisation is only a step in the direction of becoming a service. "The difference between a commodity and a service is you no longer care about how a service is provisioned," says McIsaac. "You're more interested in the service quality than the infrastructure mechanisms."
| "People don't understand how much storage they've got, where it is, how well it's being utilised, who's using it, is it being backed up, did the backups work, and can I recover?" Rob Nieboer, Storage Strategist, StorageTek |
Taking an inventory
The first stage in the journey is understanding what storage you have now and what you're likely to need in the future.
"[People] don't understand how much storage they've got, where it is, how well it's being utilised, who's using it, is it being backed up, did the backups work, and can I recover?" says Rob Nieboer, storage strategist at reseller StorageTek. "Let's start with understanding where you are today, and what the value of different data are to the business."
"Customers who are doing the most work on forecasting their capacity are getting the best deals out of the vendors," adds Greg Bowden, national business manager at systems integrator Dimension Data. If the only capacity planning you do is on a spreadsheet provided by a salesperson from a storage vendor, the vendor will be glad to help you overestimate what you need. But finding out what you have can be a complicated process. "Often our storage assets are in different locations or connected to different hosts and when we're running our businesses day to day, it's not always the thing that is top of mind to know what we've got on our assets," says Bowden.
Virtualisation and process
However, once you know what you've got, the aim is to forget about it. You may have so many terabytes in a SAN, hundreds of gigabytes in NAS boxes, or gigabytes lying fallow in various servers, but keeping track of where the free space is and manually shuffling data from one location to another does not fit most admins' definition of fun.
"One of the keys to building a service is you need to hide the details of the implementation through virtualisation... so you can actually swap around the underlying pieces of storage to suit your needs," says McIsaac. Adding new storage to the mix is another hassle that can be reduced by virtualisation; adding more disks or a new storage device simply enlarges the pool from which storage is allocated. "And you need to drive some process into the storage administrators so they do things in a repeatable way, because the only way to provide a service is a bunch of standard repeatable processes that sit over the technology."
The lessons learned from enterprise resource planning and systems management software apply equally to storage: there are tools available to automate these processes, thereby improving quality and reducing costs, but the key is understanding and defining those processes beforehand. "If you haven't figured out all the processes, there's no point in the automation," says McIsaac.
Virtualisation on its own does not greatly reduce the workload of managing all the storage. "The amount of investment that goes into managing systems has been growing as a component of the total expenses on computing," says IBM's Kandlur. "What we're trying to do is build towards a more autonomic storage system... There's a lot of work to be done on interoperability and integrated management to get to the point where you could easily add storage from an application's perspective."
 |
|
4%
4%
