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To break out of current patterns, successful companies
are starting to consider a “storage service management”
approach. This approach allows an organization to allocate suitable storage for existing applications and new
projects based on business factors. For example, knowing a major promotional campaign is about to kick off,
a manager might allocate unused higher-performance
storage for a call center order-processing application database to ensure customer orders are processed rapidly
and efficiently.
Similarly, when a new application is under development,
an IT manager can work with the business unit manager
to understand the performance expectations to determine
what type of storage would be most suitable for that application. This process will include determining how much
storage is needed, what the data retention issues are for
that data, whether the data is subject to any regulations
that require special treatment (e.g. encryption, audit
trails, etc.), and how often data will be saved to disk and
later retrieved.
Having this information, the IT manager can then select the type of storage that would be the most appropriate for the new application. The IT manager would then
check whether there is available unused storage within the
enterprise. If so, a process would need to be in place to
allocate that unused storage for this application. But if
there is not enough, additional storage that matches the
capacity, performance, and cost criteria of the project can
be purchased.
This storage service management approach would help
companies make more efficient use of their storage investments and better align IT with the overall business. For
example, the IT manager can be in the position to ask the
business managers what they want to spend. The IT manager could offer options, such as what different levels of
performance and backup protection would cost and what
the tradeoffs are.
Unfortunately, this scenario is not possible when the
storage silos and storage management are decentralized.
Companies need to understand their current environment
and need an enterprise view of storage resources so that
Symantec’s Storage United initiative:
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business decisions can be made. Having such information,
companies can then drive up utilization rates and adopt
and implement company-wide procedures to ensure optimal storage management practices.
Any storage-as-a-service solution such as this must be
scalable to accommodate the growth in data and proliferation of storage systems in most organizations.
Additionally, while making more efficient use of primary storage is certainly acceptable, but the emphasis on
efficiency should be extended to backup. Companies must
be in a position to use and manage the latest replication,
snapshot, and de-duplication technology available from
application vendors. Specifically, these techniques must be
integrated into a comprehensive storage resource management strategy.
An enterprise view helps make storage management
easier and allow for optimal use of resources. It also gives
managers the ability to monitor performance throughout
the company and provides a way to monitor and ensure
compliance with data-retention regulations.
Naturally, for all of this to work, there needs to be a central, overall enterprise view of servers and storage. With
today’s increased use of server and storage virtualization,
an enterprise view becomes more important since resource
allocation will be dictated by the numerous virtual machines running on the physical servers.
Symantec as Your Technology Partner
To address the storage management and storage resource
management needs of companies in today’s world of rapid
data growth and increasing regulations, Symantec has introduced the Veritas CommandCentral™ 5.0 product family.
