Enterprise Computing: The Four Pillars of Storage Management
Enterprise Storage, Featured, GestaltIT — By Chris Evans on May 4, 2010 at 12:42 PMI’m about to start a new series of posts discussing the whole process of Storage Management. I’m calling it the Four Pillars of Storage Management as there are 4 main components:
SERVICE – Offering of services to business customers via a service catalog and measuring the ability to deliver to the business through KPIs and Service Level Agreements.
OPERATIONAL – Implementation of best in class operational processes for delivering storage to customers, including provisioning, monitoring and capacity planning.
COMMERCIAL – creating a commercial framework which shares risk with the storage vendor and ensures purchasing can be made as efficiently as possible.
TECHNOLOGY – Selection and implementation of the best of breed technology solutions, designed and implemented to meet business requirements.
In reality, each of the Pillars could be treated as a subject in their own right, however my reason for combining them together is to emphasise that one pillar alone doesn’t support the Storage Infrastructure. They need to act together co-operatively to deliver more than the components do individually and to stop them clashing with each other.
Take a simple example. Many organisations configure their host-based software to be platform dependent. Think of the firmware, driver, HBA and MPIO stack implemented today. For EMC products, you may choose PowerPath; For Hitachi, HDLM; for IBM perhaps SDD. Using any of these software products immediately creates restrictions around the storage a host can be connected to. This makes moving between platforms more complex; it removes the ability to easily bring in another vendor and/or move data around a complex environment. By standardising on firmware/drivers/MPIO software that works with all storage in a multi-vendor environment, there’s no issue with moving data around or having a single host connected to multiple storage arrays. This then makes the purchasing question easier by removing the barriers restricting storage & server platform combinations. Vendors know that next big purchase will work across all platforms and that their technical advantage is removed. Negotiation on price becomes more interesting and useful at that point.
I described this as a simple example; in the real world we’re moving to infrastructure towers, with vendors looking to increase their lock-in, which makes this discussion all that more relevant.
Look out for more 4 Pillars posts over the coming months.
Tags: 4 Pillars, Four Pillars, storage management
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11 Comments
This is great stuff, Mr. Evans! I couldn’t agree more, and will happily write my thoughts on the topic, too!
Hi, I’m looking forward to your thoughts, in my world the big brands are already selling the vertical fully integrated, proprietary vertical stack which deviates from our strategy of open, flexible, simplistic architectures as you have mentioned. The words “you wont get the value add if you don’t use our stack” keep popping into conversations, well I’m interested to explore this “value add” because at the moment all I can see are clunky host based mobility options and enhanced round robin algorithms. For provisioning I’d love to hear your thoughts on customer based provisioning facilities in the stack e.g. Website form presented to customers who can get storage provisioned in the stack on the fly, especially when we are creating virtual guests with unique NPIV WWN’s provisioned at the time of creation. Automated provisioning in our Storage Utility is on our critical path.