An Introduction to Storage Management Systems, Part 1

In the next two newsletters, we will provide an overview of the storage management system, an essential component for large-scale, enterprise data storage deployments.

The Impact of Growth and Complexity on Today’s Data Storage Systems

Since the inception of the Internet, the need to store information has exploded. According to IDC (International Data Corporation), the volume of stored data worldwide is expected to grow 13 percent annually from now until 2025, requiring a storage capacity of 163 zettabytes (or 163 billion terabytes). Not surprisingly, this explosive growth has placed enormous pressure on enterprise IT departments. Whether required for schools, companies, hospitals, banks or government organizations, the need to store and access data with acceptable performance is critical to the operation of nearly all large organizations, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Uptime is critical. When a large data storage system goes down, customers cannot place orders, thousands of employees may be idled, and organizations cannot operate effectively. While the need to access to data on demand may be easy to understand, managing a large-scale data storage system is as complicated as it is demanding. Non-stop data growth means data storage capacity must be regularly increased, and when necessary, moved to other systems based on frequency of demand, performance, need to retain, and cost considerations. Moreover, nearly all stored data must be available on demand and protected against loss to enable daily organizational operation. Because data types differ — unstructured data such as files and structured data for database use, the associated applications and servers often differ, necessitating a mix of equipment from different computer and data storage vendors. On top of this, all data is not of equal value, requiring systems with different levels of security, performance, and availability. The key question, which the IT department of any large organization should ask itself: How do we manage, protect, and ensure access to petabytes of data when data storage requirements are exploding across the organization? The answer lies not only in selection of the right storage equipment and software, but also, an effective storage management system.

What is a Storage Management System?

Storage management refers to a technology-enabled process for efficient and assured access to stored data using a combination of software and hardware. A good storage management system should enable the management of stored data in a simple and automated manner, which includes:

• Storage Configuration Features: Flexible, process-oriented configuration tools ensure that your storage systems can be quickly and correctly set up and operate efficiently, whether during deployment installation or data migration.
• Data acquisition application(s): Built-in tools include capacity planning, data read and write management, data activity analysis, etc., will enable you to discern performance patterns and trends, and make appropriate adjustments and load balancing decisions to maximize performance and eliminate system bottlenecks.
• Mechanisms to ensure data access: In order to ensure business continuity, disaster recovery measures must be available to ensure that the storage system has the ability to recover from unexpected events that would otherwise create significant downtime. A well-designed storage management system will enable systematic backup, copy, or mirroring/replication to protect stored data, and adjustment according to the scale of the storage system, budget, and ability to tolerate to downtime. And based on these, allocation of resources to ensure on-demand data access at acceptable performance levels.
• Monitoring system: The earlier a potential failure is detected, the easier it is to avoid significant downtime. A complete monitoring system should enable monitoring of storage availability, changes to configuration, capacity usage, and occurrence of unplanned events, while also allowing the system administrator to define various alarm conditions as required. When a situation with a specific severity level arises, the management system should be able to notify administrators immediately to initiate corrective actions, before downtime events occur.
• Centralized management: Using storage virtualization methods, modern storage management systems provide a unified management platform to enable configuration, monitoring, and management of multiple systems from different vendors, using local or remote access methods from a single point of control. With a centralized management system, IT administrators can easily manage a large-scale storage system 24×7 without being tied to a data center.

Storage Management System Benefits

A storage management solution offers many benefits to large enterprises. These include:

• System users. Good storage management not only eliminates productivity-killing data loss, but it also reduces the need for information system modifications or changes to existing work methods in order to protect work-in-process data.
• IT personnel. Storage management systems can simplify many IT operations and perform automated resource configuration and management. They also enable IT personnel to manage the system locally or remotely from a centralized console, saving time and improving system accessibility at any time and from anywhere.
• Company CIOs, Line-of-Business Managers and Executives. Automated storage management reduces the risk of human error and unplanned downtime. When available, storage virtualization technology improves management of storage capacity and while providing resource flexibility, reducing costs through better use of resources and simplifying management and improving system availability. Improved efficiencies thereby reduce the required number of IT and associated operating expenses.

The result: an effective storage management system can increase organizational and IT productivity while reducing unplanned downtime and operating expense of your data center.

Data Storage: Present and Future

Storage management is not new: over the years, many technologies have been developed to aid in the management of increasingly larger and more complex storage systems. For example, automated configuration and monitoring of storage resources has been a long-time standard method for evaluating and improving the performance of existing storage resources. In addition, disaster recovery methods such as data replication, snapshot protection, and automated recovery are required features for improving data availability and recoverability. However, with the arrival of extremely large-scale, and scale-on-demand capabilities for both enterprise and cloud operations, storage management systems will continue to evolve. In the next of our newsletter, we will explain the evolving role of Software Defined Systems. Please look for our next issue!