of the biggest concerns that they have and ask me about is how to drive costs
out of their storage environment. Most of them dedicate a certain percentage of
their overall IT budgets to counter the exploding growth in their storage
environment but, due to the current economic crisis, that budget is now
shrinking. My answer to them is always very straightforward, “You need to get a
solid handle on what storage is allocated and what is used. To do so means you
need to stop allocating storage based on guesswork and instead do so based on
quantifiable metrics. At this point they usually look at me and say, “That’s
easy for you to say, but how do we go about doing that?”
Symantec’s recent
announcement about changes it has made to Veritas CommandCentral Storage now
make this follow-on question much simpler to answer. Veritas CommandCentral Storage
is obviously not a new product in the SRM (Storage Resource Management) space
as those of us “grey beards” in the storage industry still remember it as
SANPoint Control. Over the years, CommandCentral Storage has proven itself as a
time-tested application that continues to provide very unique levels of SRM
functionality such as:
- The discovery and
elimination of unused capacity across the storage environment. This helps to ensure organizations stop burning capital by buying storage
capacity that they really don’t need
Create a current or
historical view of the infrastructure.
It can create a view from the application server thru its HBA, through the FC switch
and into the internals of the storage array. This helps document the infrastructure as well as isolate
problems within it and head off issues that potentially cause downtime.
Leverage policies to
control and maintain the storage environment. Unexpected and undocumented changes are anathema in enterprise storage
environments. Using Veritas CommandCentral, companies can prevent deviations
from defined standards by not processing changes or, minimally, generating alerts
if a change does take place. This helps to ensure that strict adherence to
standards remains in place and creates a much cleaner environment to manage and
maintain over time.
However in CommandCentral’s latest rendition it introduces
an agentless approach to collect data from all the various devices that
comprise a storage infrastructure (FC host bus adapters, FC directors and switches, servers, storage
arrays, etc.) using a combination of SMI-S, device based APIs, and heuristics
(discovering information from a collection of objects that already exist)
techniques. This agentless approach keeps the risk associated with deployment
and ongoing maintenance of CommandCentral low but is also one less agent that
the storage team needs to beg for the approval of the server team to install.
Moreover moving into an agentless environment ensures that an organization can
keep operational costs low by not having to manage and maintain yet another
resource intensive process on a production application server.
The deployment of Veritas CommandCentral immediately
provides companies insight into the amount of storage they have allocated versus
used. In so doing, they can immediately reduce their overall storage costs by
verifying they are only allocating the storage that the application needs when it
needs it. Additionally, it can more importantly validate what storage capacity
is currently over-allocated and can be reclaimed.
This version of Veritas CommandCentral also
introduces a module called Veritas Storage Change Manager which takes advantage
of its new agentless approach to help further drive operational expenses out of
your storage environment (and can be used as a standalone entity). Using
Storage Change Manager you can take advantage of its following features:
- Automation of daily
processes. Operational staff can now
make changes to the storage infrastructure that follow preset policies created
by standards set forth by the architectural or engineering teams. Doing so helps
to eliminate the guess-work of operational tasks and the requirement to labor
through written instructions that may be incorrect or outdated.
Crafting of policies
for changes that are permitted in the environment. Not everyone should have the ability to makes changes to every storage
device in the environment and certainly not at any time. For example, you may
only allow Brocade Switches in Fabric A to use a specific version of firmware
to prevent hardware compatibility problems between servers and storage. You may
also want to use the software to verify that that any server connected to your
HDS USP has at least two paths to storage and only takes a maximum of 2 hops on
either path to get to the storage target.
Built-in best
practices. Years of data from managing
your existing environments coupled with recommendations from storage
manufacturers can provide companies with deeper insight into how they are going
to deploy a specific component of their storage infrastructure. They can use
this insight to determine whether or not it will function based upon what has
already been accomplished successfully or even tweak an existing environment so
it performs better.
Tracks and determines
the root cause of errors. CommandCentral can look through a set of changes that may have caused an
interruption of services for your company, analyze this information, determine
why the error occurred and then make recommendations as to what configuration
changes to make going forward to ensure this error will not occur again.
The introduction of an agentless SRM deployment and Veritas
Storage Change Management features into Veritas CommandCentral ensures that any
organization may now adopt this technology to help drive down capital expenses
by eliminating and/or forestalling net new storage purchases as they are better
able to monitor and control their storage utilization. Equally attractive, for
those that take advantage of Storage Change Manager, operational expenses can
be driven down by the adoption of real-time risk management, and best practices
since these tend to drive down operational down-time caused by human error and non-standard
processes. In doing so, Veritas CommandCentral contributes to lowering a
company’s overall cost of managing their business while helping to keep
critical Tier-1 applications up and running.