Storage management is currently a big pain point for IT departments, but a long-term goal of the industry is for storage to do most of the management itself and be presented as a service. What are the steps required to get there?
Taking stock. It's important to know how much storage your organisation has now and making realistic assumptions in order to plan for future requirements. This can help you get the best deal from vendors.
Virtualisation. Management software is working towards hiding the complexity of your physical storage architecture and presenting storage as a pool that can be expanded or reallocated easily. This also enables a set of repeatable processes to be put in place to improve the quality and decrease the cost of management.
Standards. To make virtualisation effective, storage needs to play nicely with products and management software from other vendors. Although embryonic, the storage networking industry association's standards are a step in the right direction.
Tiering. Not all data needs to be available 24x7 with instantaneous 101 percent availability. Storage can be tiered to provide different levels of availability, restore time, performance, and cost.
Policies. With numerous legislative and governance requirements on storage, storage decisions need to be driven by policies that ensure data is protected adequately to meet all the requirements.
Information lifecycle management. The combination of all the above steps and content management technologies allows data â€" down to individual database records or e-mailsâ€"to be kept in an appropriate tier of storage based on the data's value to the organisation.
Storage as a service. With all these steps in place, storage can eventually become a part of the "on-demand" or "adaptive enterprise" visions currently being pitched by vendors, where it is allocated dynamically to suit changing business requirements.
Can the storage industry keep fitting more and more data on the same-sized disks? Stay tuned in the coming months as we discuss the future of storage hardware.
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