Storage Management
For instance, the Affinion Group is testing a combination of Onaro's Application Insight and SANscreen Foundation monitoring tool. "We could be alerted in real time of any performance spikes and hopefully be informed of any issues that could cause an outage, before someone calls from the business line," says storage specialist Raul Robledo. "We wouldn't need to get inquiries or notification from individuals. We would get those right from a product that's monitoring our environment." A host of other products have entered the category of storage optimization, too.
3
Green storage technologies can cut energy bills without sacrificing performance. Storage isn't the biggest energy hog in the data centre, but new technologies can still help cut back on its power consumption by as much as 20 percent, users say. Even using storage space more efficiently can cut down on wasted capacity, experts say. This means spending less on storage in the long run. At San Diego Supercomputer Center, Don Thorp, manager of operations, looked to Copan Systems, one of a handful of relatively new, smaller green storage vendors. He reports that storage consumption is down by 10 percent to 20 percent since switching to Copan Systems last July. Many more such vendors are entering the market.
4
Advanced backup-management tools ease auditing and compliance. Over the last several years, numerous vendors have taken backups from boring to remarkable by rolling out fancy backupmanagement tools. Spun off from the broader storage-resource management market, these tools, of course, monitor and report on backups of products from multiple vendors. But they also give IT administrators an at-a-glance picture from a single console, in real time and historically. They can ease the auditing process and help create chargeback programs verify internal service-level agreements for backups. Heterogeneous backup-management tools are available from various niche vendors and the mainstream storage biggies.
5
Storage virtualization appliances can give you a single storage system for both backups and live storage. Just ask the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine (UFCVM). Over the last six months, the college has been putting its 7TB storage area network through its paces, using it for nearline backup and primary storage. UFCVM relies on storage virtualization manager (SVM), a
Vol/3 | ISSUE/11
In FacT
60% of the data is overprotected and overspent, while 10 percent is underprotected.
20% Is the amount by which new technologies can reduce data center power consumption.
95% Of all business communications is created and stored electronically.
virtualization appliance from StoreAge Networking Technologies, now owned by LSI. The SAN setup reduced backup times by half, and the project came in under budget, says Sommer Sharp, systems programmer for the college in Florida. Provisioning is a painless matter of moving volumes to any server that needs it, so live data can be managed as easily as backups.
6
Lawsuits are a fact of life and sloppy e-discovery can cost you millions. Recent surveys show that, on average, US companies face 305 lawsuits at any one time. With each lawsuit comes the obligation for discovery — production of evidence for presentation to the other side in a legal dispute. With 95 percent of all business communications created and stored electronically, that puts a heavy burden on IT to perform e-discovery, finding electronically stored information. In the US court system, the onus of e-discovery took on new weight on December 1, 2006, when amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect. "With the amendments to the FRCP, the courts are saying, 'We know the technology exists to do this stuff. We want to see you take some reasonable steps to put processes and technologies together to do e-discovery. And if you don't, we're really going to hold you accountable for it,'" says Barry Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research. He cites the recent case of Morgan Stanley vs Ronald Perelman, in which Morgan Stanley was hit with a Rs 62.8 crore jury verdict, which hinged primarily on the company's lax e-discovery procedures.
7
Storage grid standards could put an end to proprietary storage management. The Open Grid Forum, a standards organization focused on Grid Computing, is working on a variety of standards for the compute, network and storage infrastructure, all the way from describing jobs to being able to move and manage data, says Mark Linesch, who heads the organization. Work is progressing around defining a grid file system and naming schemes, and developing a storage resource manager for grids. The group is collaborating with other standards bodies like the Distributed Management Task Force and the Storage Networking Industry Association. The ultimate goal is to enable proprietary storage vendors to make their gear interoperable. CIO
—b.S.
Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in
REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 0 8
41