One of the trends in the upcoming decade in storage management is already taking shape: Automation. This trend is driven in large part by the new storage management features that have been introduced in the previous decade to address specific application challenges, but that have – in the process – created their own set of challenges in managing these features. It is these challenges that today’s release of Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 is designed to address.
Complexity has found its way into data centers over the last decade as a result of the introduction of new technologies. However, enterprise networked storage systems in all of their different forms with all of their different options have probably contributed as much to this increase in complexity as any other technology in the data center.
Consider just some of the options that are available on enterprise storage arrays that make managing storage more complex:
- Different tiers of disk with different capacities and speed
- Different types of RAID to address specific availability, cost and performance concerns
- Thin provisioning to minimize storage allocation
- Multiple storage networking interfaces (FC, Ethernet, Infiniband)
In addition, there are over 30 providers of enterprise storage arrays who each implement features on their storage arrays in different flavors. As a result, organizations deploying multiple storage arrays can easily create silos of storage capacity, lose track of how much storage is on specific arrays, what capacity is utilized on these arrays and over-allocate capacity to prevent applications from running out of capacity and experiencing outages. It is no wonder that managing storage has become so complex!
This complexity is in part what Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability (HA) has previously addressed by enabling organizations to pool these storage resources, optimize storage utilization, provide a common means for managing storage and preventing downtime.
But as enterprise organizations continue to consolidate data centers, accelerate their adoption of server virtualization and increase the number of servers (physical or virtual) under Storage Foundation’s management, they need to automate the processes associated with the ongoing management of Storage Foundation, as well.
So though Storage Foundation provides a consistent means to manage storage across multiple operating systems presented to them by multiple storage arrays, administrators still had to figure out:
- How the underlying LUN presented to Storage Foundation is constructed (what RAID group, performance level, etc)
- Additional features present in the LUN (thin provisioning, SCSI-3 reservation)
- Types of storage to be provisioned to the application (high performance, high capacity, or highly available)
It is these three challenges that Veritas Operations Manager, bundled free with Storage Foundation, addresses in the following ways.
First, it eliminates the need for the administrator to determine how each LUN presented by a storage array to Storage Foundation is constructed beneath the covers. Storage Foundation can communicate with the attached storage array to gather information about the LUN: its RAID configuration, the type of disk it is using and other special features it may offer such as thin provisioning or a SCSI-3 reservation. This information is then gathered and provided to Veritas Operations Manager.
Second, using Veritas Operations Manager administrators get a complete view of how much and what type of storage is assigned to each physical or virtual server. Equipped with that information, they can use Veritas Operations Manager to create a storage templates (for example, Gold, Silver and Bronze) that automatically put these LUNs into the appropriate storage pools based upon the template definitions.
Third, these templates are then applied to all of the servers that are under Veritas Operation Manager’s control so that as new LUNs are presented and discovered by Storage Foundation on each of these servers, the template automatically detects the properties of that LUN and puts it into the correct storage pool on that server.
In this way, as an application needs more storage of a specific type, Storage Foundation can be set to automatically pull a LUN from the appropriate pool and assign it to that application without the need for administrative intervention.
Veritas Operations Manager can also work in reverse. If Storage Foundation detects that all of the space on a thinly provisioned LUN has been freed with its Thin Reclamation API, it can reclaim that LUN and put it back into the appropriate storage pool for future use.
Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 does not eliminate the need for server and storage administrators to communicate with application owners so they understand what the application requirements are. But once those application requirements are established, Veritas Operations Manager does provide them with the visibility that they need into their storage infrastructure so they can create a catalog of servers and services that, once applied, can automate the deployment and reclamation of storage to applications in their environment.