Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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Storage management Server virtualization will continue to complicate storage management. "This is a new dimension for storage management," says Joseph Zhou, senior analyst, storage research at Ideas International Inc., Rye Brook, NY. Virtualization requires dynamic reprovisioning to accommodate changes to virtual servers. In five years, dynamic reprovisioning should be supported for leading hypervisors (see "Future directions: Server virtualization," below).
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 Convergence of protocols over a unified fabric promises simplified management. "You will be able to manage across FC and iSCSI," says Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, Boulder, CO. Unresolved is who will manage the FCoE network: network admins or storage admins. "Intelligent storage is the management solution," insists Steve Luning, VP, office of the CTO at Dell. Storage intelligence could reside in the app, server, data, array, off in the cloud or some middle layer. "Maybe the hypervisor handles the management," suggests Luning. But some storage management tasks aren't practical to automate. "You can automate the most common tasks, like backup, but these aren't what cause problems," says Schulz. Problems caused by increased complexity and products that comply with standards at a high level but break the standard deeper down will continue to make storage difficult to manage. "Where vendors provide management tools, they're all stovepiped. Cisco or EMC can add management capabilities, but most often they only work in their environments. As soon as you go beyond the vendor, you lose the management benefits," notes StorageIO Group's Schulz, adding that "this is unlikely to change." What's needed is a common storage management platform that's transparent from top to bottom. SMI-S doesn't do the trick, according to Toigo at Toigo Partners International. Instead, he envisions the SAN as a set of managed Web services.
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This was first published in December 2008
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