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June 30, 2003

It's What's Inside That Counts

Obsessed with controlling costs, the storage management field is in danger of missing the point: To manage infrastructure with a focus on data-the lifeblood of enterprise intelligence

by Richard Scannell

Over the past 18 months, a pervasive mantra of "do more with less" combined with heavily reduced or eliminated budgets has forced IT managers to look for untapped efficiency gains in their environments. One area quickly identified as "low-hanging fruit" has been storage utilization.

Firms that had been operating in stealth mode for a year suddenly entered the market with storage resource management (SRM) tools that offered to identify and recapture unused or underused storage capacity. These vendors promised to provide IT the means to increase the average storage environment from 30 percent utilized to at least 60 percent. Utilization became the hot topic of the day in the storage world.

Challenging economic conditions and other phenomena that have led IT to seek efficiency gains have also caused disk suppliers to slash prices to the point where disk storage is now a commodity. IT managers joke that it's cheaper to buy disk than spend the money on SRM tools! While the industry was busy bringing tools to market to manage extremely expensive assets, the very target for such tools — disk capacity — was reaching commodity status.

I'm not suggesting that SRM is a white elephant. To the contrary, SRM will remain an essential cog in running an efficient storage environment. Moreover, in many cases vendors are already reconstituting SRM from a stand-alone product into deeper and richer product sets. Disk utilization remains an issue, but as an increasing number of products come to market with SRM as a built-in capability, the metrics that turned heads only 18 months ago now seem passe to the average CIO.

The Real Issue

What all the disk vendors seemed to have missed is that the data and information resident on disks is of much greater value than mere disk storage capacity.

While SRM is useful to manage capacity, it does nothing to help the IT manager appropriately support the business other than arguably slow down the scheduling of purchase orders to disk vendors. IT managers need an understanding of the value of data to the business — and a strategy that ensures spending on technology is appropriately in line with the value of the data.

By segmenting and assigning values to data (for example, critical, moderate, or low value) and understanding quantities, or occupancy, at each level, IT can implement differing standards for availability, recoverability, and correspondingly, cost at each of those levels, and do so in a way where costs become more predictable. By defining separate architectures for each level by a series of attributes, and then developing rules that dictate when data resides at one level or another, IT can control costs by spending more on protecting critical business information and less on lower value data.

IT and the vendor community's thinking must shift from the management of devices to the management of data. In the past, due to relatively small quantities of data, these issues would be treated predominantly as one and the same. When a device approached the end of its life (or lease), a new, typically larger array was wheeled into the data center, and IT did a migration. This approach worked relatively well in a direct-attached model, where the IT administrator needed to negotiate only with the application owner to ensure good management of planning and downtime. With the move to network-based storage, however, this model fails because data is typically distributed across multiple devices. With additional layers of virtualization, it can be even harder to determine the exact location of the data.