Mastering Storage Complexity

By Thomas Schmidt

Data center complexity in today's enterprise continues to grow at a dizzying rate. Data volumes are doubling every two years, while storage utilization rates hover at 33%. And data is needlessly duplicated -- CMP Media Research estimates by as much as 50 to 500 times. Consequently, space, power and cooling issues are growing in severity.

That's the bad news. The good news is that new technologies are available to help IT gain control of complex storage environments. A new generation of backup, recovery and storage management solutions allow organizations to unlock the potential of disk-based data protection, get full visibility of what's in their diverse storage environment, optimize their storage utilization, and get on the path to running storage as a service.

This article addresses the key storage challenges enterprises face today. It then provides an overview of initiatives that enables organizations to unite their diverse storage platforms, unite isolated islands of storage administration, and unite storage and IT with the business.

Three big problems
The thorny storage issues described above can be traced to three root problems:

• Platform problem Virtually every data center in the world has multiple operating systems, chipsets, virtual machines, arrays and so on. And each one of these platforms typically has management tools that run only on that particular platform. That means that if an organization wants to run a heterogeneous data center, it's forced to deal with dozens of disparate tools, and literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of infrastructure. As the complexity in a data center worsens, IT's ability to meet aggressive service levels within severely constrained IT budgets becomes almost impossible.
• Administration problem To deal with this complexity, many enterprises take the short-term step of creating isolated "islands" or "silos" of storage -- something they can get their arms around. The trouble is, these islands start to proliferate, and each one grows until the problem becomes much worse. The result is no central visibility into the overall storage environment, which means you can't manage it well. This, in turn, is why utilization rates are so low.
• Business problem Currently, there's a yawning gap between the storage team and the business team. Too often, it's as if business owners were on the deck of a ship next to the wheel, shouting storage demands -- with little understanding or awareness of, or accountability for, the impact of what they're asking for. All they know is that someone is down in the engine room, shoveling more coal into the boiler. It's a situation that leads to inflated demands, unrealistic timeframes, and storage that is a reactive cost center rather than a true partner of the business.

New storage initiatives
To help enterprises tackle storage complexity, new initiatives take a software-oriented approach to delivering storage as a service. This enables enterprises to simplify the management of the most complex, heterogeneous data center environments. This enables them to unite their diverse storage platforms, to unite isolated islands of storage administration, and to unite storage operations with IT business objectives.

At the core of these initiatives is the idea that a software -- rather than a hardware -- approach should be used to resolve the root causes of today's storage problems.
The premise is straightforward: Understanding your current environment is all about visibility. You must be able to see everything you have, across all platforms and data centers. Once you can see everything, you can manage it more effectively and efficiently by taking steps to drive up utilization, concentrating on improving operations, and finally delivering storage as a service by establishing different levels of service, delivering them, and tracking and measuring them.

Conclusion
Storage continues to grow at an alarming rate, while available floor space, power and cooling, budget and skilled staff are becoming troublingly scarce. Enterprises need a practical path for getting a handle on these increasingly difficult storage environments while, at the same time, also controlling costs and improving service levels.

New initiatives have been designed to help enterprise storage professionals address the root causes behind the growing cost and complexity of their storage environments. It offers a convincing argument for uniting and integrating data center storage with business requirements.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.