What’s wrong with storage management?
Mario Apicella asked a very interesting question on Friday: “Is storage management already past its prime?”
He wrote:
It may sound hasty to dismiss a technology that many companies have yet to deploy or even evaluate, but some of the vibes I am getting lately from vendors suggest that storage management applications may become obsolete before becoming mainstream.
It’s hard to give a short answer to the question of what’s wrong with storage management, but perhaps the beginning of the end for the technology is the limited scope revealed by its name.
Does it make sense to devolve so much effort to rein in just a single piece of the infrastructure puzzle? Shouldn’t storage be orchestrated in harmony with other important — perhaps even more important — pillars such as servers, networks, and above all, applications?
I think he’s right because the IT Data Center has evolved to a shared, virtualized world. It is no longer sufficient to look at and understand just one piece of the puzzle. A holistic view of the problem must be taken.
Recently I was on a sales call at a very large enterprise. Its data center contains thousands of servers and petabytes of storage. The person with whom I was talking had a mission. His mission was to optimize his server utilization. He realized that the pitifully low utilization he was currently experiencing was costing him greatly. When I asked him what his approach was going to be it became obvious to me that he couldnt succeed. His approach was to combine applications onto servers that had sufficient CPU horsepower. But I asked him a couple of simple questions. What about the applications storage requirements? How can you make changes to your applications and servers without understanding the impact on your shared storage pool. A light bulb went off for the customer. He realized I was right. He couldnt accomplish his mission without taking that holistic view. Everything is interconnected. Changing servers has a great impact on the underlying storage system and vice versa. This was now a great time to talk with him about Akorris BalancePoint product. I quickly told him that BalancePoint creates the Cross-Domain view he’d need and provide the analysis and modeling required to do the job efficiently.
What was it that Lincoln said? “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” While there’s certainly a place for storage management systems, they are not the panacea as they have often been portrayed. Without a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and a good understanding of the increasingly complex relationship between storage, applications, operating systems and servers, troubleshooting problems will continue to be an exercise in finger pointing.
