Utility Computing

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Storage Area Networks (SANs) have enormous potential to impact much more than storage management. SANs can and should serve as the infrastructure for utility-based processes for the entire IT organization.

Today, this potential is at risk due to the inherent complexity in managing SAN changes, such as adding a server, a switch, or a redundant path between devices. Resolving the SAN change management problem holds great benefits, including:

• Operational efficiencies in managing and growing SANs
• Risk reduction
• Adoption of advanced technologies that facilitate consolidation, virtualization, resource efficiencies and utility-based management

The current state of SAN complexity is an obstacle for scaling the SAN and using it as a shared infrastructure and the basis for future IT improvements. SANs must provide reliable and dynamic service to the IT and business organizations so lines of business can rely on storage to be an always-available utility. However, this is not an easy task, and storage teams at medium and large IT organizations are all facing the same challenges - how to:

• Maintain 100% application availability while applying SAN changes
• Reduce SAN management inefficiencies and support growth without additional resources
• Integrate SAN management into standard IT management procedures through the IT operations team

Storage administration staffs that manage storage networks are beginning to realize that these challenges are difficult to overcome using methods available today or by adding more people to the teams. The core limitation of current methods for changing and growing SANs stems from the sheer number and complexity of SAN access paths and their interdependencies. How will organizations determine the impact of local device changes on end-to-end access paths? SAN complexity increases exponentially as the SAN grows and as new technologies and additional people become involved in the process. This challenge has storage administrators searching for solutions in SAN management software that will allow them to maintain availability while reliably changing and scaling their storage to meet business needs. The solution requires:

• Monitoring and troubleshooting SAN changes and understanding their impact
• Understanding the impact of past changes on access paths
• Conducting root-cause analysis to accelerate problem resolution
• Automating planning and performing simulation to detect errors before they impact the SAN
• Capturing access-path events and change history for auditing and regulatory compliance

Most IT staffers have found themselves poorly equipped to confront the complex maze of access paths in an end-to-end SAN, armed with only archaic spreadsheets and manual tools. Adding staff has not been the answer, since analyzing the vast number of logical and physical inter-dependencies winding through the SAN gets even more complicated when more people are involved in the change process.

Without a change management framework to validate and automate the change process, the enterprise remains at risk of downtimes, brownouts, security breaches and loss of customer confidence. A recent survey from an IT newsweekly found that managing the complexity of storage networks is one of IT's top challenges. Even a small SAN can have tens of thousands of potential configuration states. A seemingly minor fabric configuration mistake or error in volume masking or cabling can prove devastating, causing data corruption, breaching security and wasting hours of productivity in troubleshooting.

Studies have shown that 25-35% of changes made to a SAN have at least one error, which could be in cabling, port configuration, LUN masking, etc. Many errors - such as lack of redundancy - may remain hidden from view, since data continues to flow until the second path is jeopardized.

Current SAN management tools fail to assist the storage administrator in achieving one of the enterprise's top requirements - end-to-end availability. For a business to realize the full value of a SAN's economy of scale, storage managers must be able to make changes accurately and quickly to keep pace with business requirements. Device monitoring, provisioning, disk utilization, and other software tools provide capabilities that can never be used if the SAN is unstable.

Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools focus on asset management and storage utilization to provide file systems and database utilization levels. However, these capabilities are ineffective if the SAN infrastructure is flawed according to storage analyst Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Strategy Group. SAN change management is a prerequisite "to make all previous investments you have made in storage management, network management, and application management finally return on your investment."

Most storage management problems - and certainly the most complex ones - relate to performing changes. Manual tools are still used to manage changes and are not replaced by SRM tools. SRM software gives IT and storage staffs the impression that they have control over their SAN. In reality, they fail to deal with a SAN's inherent complexity and the difficulty in managing SAN changes.

Urgent and planned changes take days and weeks to complete and storage staffs lack a way to validate changes to ensure that they were made accurately, with accordance to the plan and without any painful downtime. Change cycles for SANs average 10 - 12 days for anticipated changes, and as much as four days for emergency changes. The problem isn't just in validation of the changes and troubleshooting and fixing errors. Storage administrators lack effective control over the different IT groups - such as storage, operations, switches, networking, and cabling - often dispersed across the organization. Control becomes particularly challenging when change directives must be performed in a precise sequence across these disparate groups.

Sadly, the very investment a company made in SAN infrastructure to improve storage efficiencies has become an operational log jam, threatening productivity, business continuity and loss of client confidence.

The solution comes in managing and automating the change process. According to analyst firm Gartner, "improving IT change management processes is generally considered one of the best investments an enterprise can make. Companies that don't properly manage IT changes lose time, money, and efficiency and are subjecting the entire business to undo risk."

Software that detects fatal errors before, during, and after SAN change has recently come onto the market and has been deployed in some of the largest SANs in the world. This software technology continuously maps, simulates, and analyzes the entire storage network in order to troubleshoot errors and find their root causes. Such predictive SAN change management reduces operational complexity, costs, and risk and improves SAN availability, assurance, and customer confidence.

Here is a breakdown of how a predictive change process is implemented through SAN change management software:

• SAN change validation: An analytical impact model is applied for every SAN change and reports back to the administrator any changes to the SAN along with their analyzed impact on the access path availability, performance, and security.
• SAN change troubleshooting: Whenever a problem is discovered during the validation phase, its root-cause can be analyzed instantly, and step-by-step roadmaps to resolution are generated. This enables the appropriate fix to take place quickly with very limited impact on service level, potentially before the user is aware of any problems.
• SAN change audit: The change management framework enables the capture of the entire change history of all processes and events, in order to generate management summary and trending reports, troubleshoot and validate change implementation, and to facilitate the documentation and audit capabilities of all change history and processes. This is increasingly important as IT comes under scrutiny to provide highly reliable access to information.
• Planning: Planning ahead and simulating future changes makes every future change process a predictable and deterministic process. By employing change management software with predictive capabilities, the storage administrator quickly captures and details all required change tasks and actions with their future impact on access paths.
• Tracking: The software assists in delegation and coordination of the activities of departments assigned to implement change tasks. The software also logs and tracks every configuration change in the SAN and validates that change tasks have been made correctly, in the proper order and manner, through continuous analyzing of the network.

Structured change management's benefits promptly become clear when compared in real life with previous methods, improving accuracy, operational efficiency, and accelerating change times.

Looking to the near future, where utility computing promises to bring new efficiencies to organizations, providing on-demand delivery of applications, computational power, and storage to business units - change management software is essential. Utility computing is based on the ideas of flexibility and efficiency from dynamic allocation of resources to generate competitive advantage and reduce IT costs for enterprises. This of course increases the need for accurate and dynamic changes to storage environments.

Although utility computing is still in its nascent stages, many IT organizations are already taking first steps toward utility computing-based service delivery. These steps usually include changing internal billing to charge for resources used, as well as application consolidation and sharing of infrastructure and applications. Some companies are taking advantage of on-demand pricing from their vendors by purchasing products and services according to actual usage.

To support the utility computing change, IT departments are evaluating software and hardware technologies to assist in on-demand service delivery including storage networks, server clusters, and applications sharing. These technologies promise to provide better resource allocation to meet ever-changing business needs.

SAN Change Management Enables Utility Computing
Establishing successful utility computing service delivery depends on the control and reach of the storage networking environment. SANs were one of the first utility computing-enabling technologies to become mainstream for many organizations. SANs today have been used for data center and organizational consolidation and, if well-managed, can supply the infrastructure to support dynamic storage changes through centralized storage practices and control.

Utility computing's on-demand delivery of applications cannot take place without an underlying storage networking infrastructure in which:

1. Changes can be made quickly and accurately
2. There is full control over the change process to attain 100% availability of the SAN during any change - large or small.

Change management supports the transition of SANs into an on-demand environment by reducing the risk of business disruptions through better SAN-change planning, predictive assessment, and continuous validation of changes. Additionally, it can increase management efficiencies by freeing the SAN architect to manage the architecture and policies and become better attuned to the needs of internal clients to make SANs an always available utility without adding operational resources.

Conclusion
As demands for storage capacities rise (the Meta Group has projected a 40-60% annual increase in storage capacities in enterprise data centers), and as utility computing becomes increasingly dynamic, more SAN changes will be required to be performed in a shorter time period, and the technical complexity of networked storage environments will multiply. The confidence of IT professionals in them will likewise diminish without help. Change management technology is required to accelerate the delivery of on-demand SAN service and support on-demand application delivery.

More and more companies are evaluating the need for IT change frameworks to incorporate change management analytical validation models. As the next generation in management software come of age, IT will be able to make the move to the first change management solution for SANs. The most innovative enterprises will take advantage of this opportunity to control and validate their change process helping the SAN reach its promise.