Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
One of the biggest challenges facing the enterprise is storage provisioning. With so many stakeholders maintaining interest in your enterprise’s storage, you need to understand and follow several important principles. These principles will help you in a number of ways, not the least of which is helping to make sure that your company is able to do business efficiently and without a significant interruption of service in business-critical areas.
Here are several principles to follow when it comes to enterprise storage provisioning:
1. Communication is primary. Those stakeholders each have a vested interest in what happens with your storage. Keeping the lines of communication open, not just between IT and departmental stakeholders but also between individual stakeholders, is essential to creating the right kind of provisioning approach. By building a provisioning team out of those stakeholders, you spread responsibility and ownership for the storage function.
2. Standardize when possible. The harsh reality of IT today is that environments are heterogeneous. Whenever it’s feasible, though you should try to standardize between classes of storage. The key here is not to impact the functionality of a given solution, and not to force hegemony where it really doesn’t belong.
3. Keep data storage security at the top of your priority list. Whether it’s something simple like making sure that your organization’s password policy is implemented on your array element manager, or whether it’s something more complex like SAN infrastructure security, you need to practice due diligence in this area. Make sure that the interfaces for your enterprise storage management system and the interface for your SRM package are on a management network, isolated from the rest of the enterprise’s computing resources. Don’t ever let those management functions out onto the public network.
4. Use updated storage provisioning tools. If you have a maintenance contract for your storage management solution, you may be eligible for free upgrades. As is usually the case with management software, newer editions usually have a more intuitive interface, more useful configuration wizards and a greater capacity for automation.
5. Don’t forget to provision a sizable amount of storage for the virtualized servers. Do what you need to give the virtual server team the tools it requires to dissect the storage pool into smaller units of storage that can be accessed by individual virtual machines. This will let your storage admins not have to deal with provisioning each and every new virtual machine. Unless you have an application that needs to directly be able to communicate with the array, stick with the VMs.
6. Look into thin provisioning. Thin provisioning is a great way to improve storage utilization. By using thin provisioning, you can offer sizable chunks of storage space to the server that will only actually be allocated when it is being used.
Above all, always check your provisioning decisions against your business purposes. Your storage needs are a means to an end, and only one element of what makes your company able to do what it does.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Oct 05, 2009 @ 06:00 AM
One of the biggest concerns of CIOs, IT managers, SAN administrators and even network engineers is the issue of storage provisioning. Storage provisioning, in a nutshell, is the process of assigning storage in order to optimize the performance of your Storage Area Network (SAN). Provisioning can be a tremendously tedious process, as any SAN administrator can tell you.
Why is storage provisioning so taxing? Well, for one, storage provisioning requires you to go through several steps, all of which must occur in a specific order. You have to assign LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers), verify that data storage and data recovery routes are available to users when they need them, create alternate routes in case of a partial failure, and make sure that the SAN can accommodate expansion. Once everything has been engineered and set up, you have to thoroughly test the SAN before you can commit your valuable data to it.
The good news is that a process known as automated storage provisioning has risen in popularity. There are a number of programs that perform automated storage provisioning. These programs are designed to lessen the workload of the SAN administrator, and to free her up for other less-tedious tasks.
There are different types of automated storage provisioning you should be familiar with. Each type represents an increasingly complex level of automated storage provisioning, and what sort your business uses depends on how intense and complex your needs are.
Application-Aware Provisioning
This sort of provisioning provides solutions for business services by adapting your storage situation to the needs of the application. For example, a given application in your organization might have threshold requirements for applications or application data. When the data or the application service level hits the threshold requirement, this type of automated storage provisioning software kicks in and alerts the SAN administrator. This kind of solution runs across virtualized volumes, providing a great deal of flexibility as well as tools that will simplify and automate the provisioning efforts.
Policy-Driven Provisioning
Another sort of automated storage provisioning is policy-driven provisioning. This type of software lets you set business-specific policies. These policies kick in to assign and to configure your storage space and paths so that the application can run properly. This kind of automated storage provisioning will help you maintain your service level objectives, also through the use of thresholds. Here again, this type fo solution will automated many of the tasks involved in expanding your SAN.
You have many choices when it comes to choosing an automated storage provisioning solution. HP is one of the most widely-praised vendors, but there are others, too.
If you want to greatly increase the reliability and service level of your Storage Area Network and free up your valuable IT resources to address other tasks, you should consider an automated storage provisioning solution.