storagemanagement

SRM Tools – an Extreme Cash Cow?

In the storage blogosphere, Storagebod’s posts hold particular weight for me because he is one of the few bloggers that are NOT working for a storage vendor. He writes from an end-user perspective…because he is one.

I found his latest post representative of storage user’s thoughts on the topic of Storage Resource Management (SRM). In his Extreme Cash Cow – Redux post, he writes about challenges he had with ECC, but his comments are geared towards general SRM providers.

I have personally seen raised frustrations around SRM tools from end-users ever since the “Single-Pane-of-Glass” glory days – pitched by every storage vendor under the sun.

What’s going on?

My take on SRM can be summed up on a recent client call. We were talking about developing a storage strategy and storage infrastructure optimization plan:

Client: We already deployed a Storage Optimization plan.

Me: Great! How did you do it?

Client: We bought an SRM tool from XYZ vendor (one of the big disk vendors)

Me: Great, so how did it go? Did you return wasted space to free pool? Did you locate allocated but unused space, orphaned space and files, inert or unreferenced data, etc.?

Client: Well, no. It didn’t work.

Me: Why? What happened?

Client: Well…we bought the tool, and had some issues with deployment. And we couldn’t get the tool to accurately identify inert space. And we needed some information from our application admins, but they wouldn’t cooperate.

Me: So what did you do?

Client: We told management we needed another headcount. To manage the SRM tool and extract and interpret the data from it. It turned out to be a full-time job.

Me: What did management say?

Client: No. They said they freed resource to buy the tool, but can’t justify more headcount to manage it.

In essence, this optimization/SRM tool turned into Shelfware. Storagebod sums up part of the problem on his blog – this stuff isn’t easy. It’s pretty complex and each environment is different, so building one tool to management everything is extremely hard to do.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is this: You need an expert with your expert SRM tool. It may not be what you want to hear (we all want a magic bullet solution) - but it is reality. Consider these tasks:

• First you need to install it and deploy it correctly (not always easy).
• Next you need to configure it based on your needs and priorities.
• Then you need to collect data and usage patterns for a set period, so you monitor all the peak and valley times.
• Then you need to write a clear and digestible PLAN based on the data that leads to ACTIONS that will lead to RESULTS.
• Then you need to align your organization around this plan.
• Then you need to deploy the plan, track metrics, and report on its success.

A single tool can’t do this. A person with a tool has to. So, we have two choices here

1. Justify headcount to go with the tool
2. Buy the tool and storage expert together as a service

Storagebod cautions in his blog post that the service cost should be more than just fixing the tool and getting it to work properly. What clients need is a fact-based Storage Optimization Plan and Roadmap based on tool findings.

If you are not buying that (the reason why you want an SRM tool in the first place) then you are buying Shelfware.

What SRM tool do I use?

Again, it’s not about the tool alone, but the interpretation of the tool’s data. But, if you are interested, the best tool I have seen is from pure-play SRM vendor Tek-Tools. They cover primary, backup, and virtualized environments. The folks there are great and the tool continues to improve. But again, make sure you have a storage expert or service to go with that tool to accomplish what you are really looking for.

Getting Real with RELDATA

A couple months ago we had a client that needed to migrate production data from one data center to another across geographies. There were a couple of complications, so our team put their heads together on a solution.

A Client’s Need
We determined it would be faster (and cheaper) to replicate the data from Data Center A’s production environment to some sort of storage repository. Then we would truck/plane that repository to Data Center B – which had a much faster transfer rate than sending the data over the network (given the amount of data we were dealing with). Once at Data Center B, we could copy the data from our storage repository to its new home. But the production data at Data Center A would have changed over the time the replicated copy was on its trip. So once were up at Data Center B, we would need to sync the delta in data to capture all these changes. This could happen over a network line, as the delta in data would be much smaller than the entire production environment.

It sounded like a good plan – and we had everything we needed to do it but a unified appliance that could handle iSCSI, FC, and NAS protocols as well as WAN replication.

Enter RELDATA
We sat down with the folks at RELDATA, troubleshot the problem, threw a couple tough questions their way, and…were very impressed. What stood out to me was the following:

• RELDATA is really a unified storage appliance/gateway built from the ground up – they offer iSCSI, FC SAN, and NAS in a virtualized appliance – in 1GbE and 10GbE flavors. They weren’t a NAS company moving into the SAN market; or a SAN company moving into the NAS market – they set out to build a virtual/unified appliance.
• They offer local & WAN data replication & snapshot functionality. Additionally, the appliance looks very simple to install/manage. In fact, their management council was pretty simple and slick with some cool wizard functionality.
• One for the kickers for me was cost/value. It is priced well (website says MSRP is $40k for a 12TB iSCSI SAN, $85k for a 48TB system with SAS under the hood.) But the real value is in software licensing. It is very simple and has NO capacity licensing, which is refreshing in a world where every new feature seems to come with a complex licensing price tag. In fact, they have all inclusive software pricing - NAS, IP SAN, Global WAN Replication, and Virtualization come included. Pretty cool.

RELDATA is a young company, and its roots started in Europe (although they are now HQ’d in NJ). But they are old enough to have several successful implementations under their belt, and newer versions of their systems are coming out. I also found the people and support in the company to be very good and responsive.

RELDATA’s 9240i System

The 9240i is their latest system, some quick specs and highlights:

• Includes 12TB SAS Storage in 2U that can scale from there. Storage can be added via JBOD expansion shelf. Systems can also be clustered.
• They claim 70,000 IOPS and 820MBps performance.
• You can choose the licensed functionality you need right away (iSCSI SAN, NAS, etc.) and turn on optional licenses when needed.
• Block-level replication + snapshot included with software.
• Offers heterogeneous virtualization to play with existing assets.
• Mix 1GbE and 10GbE connectivity with either six 1GbE ports (expandable up to 16) or up to eight 10GbE ports.

A Solid Appliance
So, if you are looking for a practical, solid unified appliance for iSCSI SAN, NAS, replication, migration, consolidation, etc. take a look at RELDATA. It may not have all the bells and whistles as larger vendors, but it looks to be a well-built and designed gateway/appliance that can get the job done – simply and affordably.

This Week in Storage (12-19-08)

Jingle bell storage: What to buy a geek
A great list for the geek in your life. Best gift idea? Kiva.org! I’m the geek Beth mentions in the last paragraph. My buddy who gave me the gift? CBS news’ Hari Sreenivasan.

Economic Downturn Hits Storage Spending
Ok – so I think we all know that our IT budgets will be flat or cut next year. We also know that data will continue to grow (and grow fast) regardless of what we do with our budgets. So what to do? Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you haven’t run a formal efficiency and optimization program in your storage infrastructure environment, then you are overlooking a huge chuck of wasted capacity and space. The storage utilization and allocation rates are far worse than most vendors are telling us (I know b/c I came from one!) It’s not in their best interested to sell less storage, but it is in yours to buy less…

The state of data backup in 2009, Part 3
Good reading in Beth’s Data Backup series – this issue covers disaster recovery and the emergence of Cloud backup. Amazon was first to market with S3, EMC came out with Mozy, and Beth writes about Symantec’s offering…

Symantec adds change management to SRM
Symamtec mentions making agentless options available too. When I work with IT admins this is top of their list – they don’t like agents crawling all over their environment. I understand – but agents will still be around, maybe minimized. ESG says that SRM tools aren’t viewed as a must-have – this is unfortunate. There is HUGE value in them – but you need to know (or have a partner that knows) how to deploy them, interpret them, and ACT upon the data. If you don’t take this step, you just bought shelf-ware. You do this, and you can free between 30% - 70% of your capacity – I’ve seen this done with multiple infrastructures and count THAT as a must have.

Brocade Buys Foundry Networks for $3B
Brocade drops $3B to pick up Foundry – a good move on the surface. This will make them more competitive with Cisco – offering LAN and WAN equip. 10GbE still looks to be a great bet, and networking companies are investing in it. See Stephen Foskett’s blog.

HDS embraces SSDs
HDS is a little late to the party (EMC led the charge, followed by Sun and others). But USP is a great disk system, and SSD will make it better. STEC is making out as the SSD partner to have. Again – if you have any apps that live or die by latency times, you need to be researching SSD options.

“Despereaux” uses clustered storage
For you HPC junkies, the movie “Despereaux” had to chunk through 1,700 shots and 90 million images. They did it the way most do, Linux clusters running an HPC filesystem – this one Lustre. They stored 200TB of generated data on Infortrend’s EonStor RAID system (comment if you know anything about EonStor – I don’t). I’ll probably take my boy to the movie and bore him on the details on how it was made…