5/18/08 - Olocity in InfoWeek

InformationWeek features Olocity and its leadership (Roger Reich) in shaping the direction of Stroage Resource Management (SRM) and open storage management. Text of the article is below.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/fabrics/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207800209

Olocity Corporation
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What, exactly, is storage resource management? Have the functions of SRM changed since they were first mapped out by IBM (NYSE: IBM) in the 1970s?
Ask a silly question, as they say. And that's just what we did of a number of storage vendors. Most listed product features and functions, throwing in a few platitudes about "empowering IT." But a few intriguing frameworks emerged.
Roger Reich, an architect of the Storage Networking Industry Association's effort to create storage management standards and now CEO of Olocity, gives a layer-based description of SRM. Layer 1 functions as configuration management, including hardware and topology discovery and configuration mapping as it pertains to performance, cost, expandability, security, and redundancy. Layer 2 is capacity management, including trending. Layer 3 consists of data management, such as discovering what application and user data is stored on which components and whether it's being handled according to compliance requirements. Functions in Layer 4 include storage analytics, comprising an ongoing assessment of the capabilities, availability, and risk associated with the storage environment, combined with monitoring operating policies. Using Reich's model, most SRM product functionality nests in the first two layers.
Jamie Clifton, director of business development for BridgeHead Software, takes the interesting tack of aligning the value of SRM with business cost issues and the fit with existing infrastructure. Clifton notes that the ultimate goal of SRM is to turn stored data into "usable intellectual property," a view that extends the functionality set of SRM beyond mere tools for infrastructure and data movement optimization and into the realm of data management, such as looking inside files to learn what they contain. Other respondents mainly equate SRM with capacity management and, depending on the company's capabilities, include additional functions ranging from backup monitoring, in the case of Tek-Tools, to e-mail reporting (IBM), help desk and trouble-ticket management (HP), and managing to service levels (Network Appliance).
Our take: SRM has no common meaning within the industry, beyond basic topology discovery and hardware status/capacity monitoring and reporting. This makes it even more critical for IT to know what storage problems are most acute before shopping for SRM.
Storage resource management can't halt sprawl by itself. Data growth will, ultimately, drive storage capacity increases even in well-managed infrastructures. However, the reality is we can't see capacity clearly because of vendor "proprietariness" that's exacerbated by sleight-of-hand technologies, including thin provisioning, deduplication, and virtualization.
Because you can't manage what you can't see, SRM is supposed to give us clarity and visibility into what we have so we can administer it more effectively. That's one ingredient of a real strategy for containing sprawl. The other components fall under data management, including hierarchical storage management and granular intelligent archiving based on data class and policy. Combined, SRM and data management equal effective storage management.
The problem is, there is no standard set of SRM functionality, so IT buyers need to have a clear set of objectives they're trying to address, lest they wind up with a bottomless project that devours time and resources like the storage infrastructure it was meant to tame.
"Identify where you plan to make savings that will pay for the product and deployment," says CA's Marco Coulter, VP of software engineering, and Todd Michaels, product manager.
Easy for them to say, but this goes to the heart of an issue long plaguing SRM. "The price tag for off-the-shelf SRM is too high, and so Perl and my backup server have become fast friends to give me some analysis reports on storage utilization at my company," says one IT pro, adding that he tried SRM from Veritas-Symantec but ripped it out in short order, preferring the more exact and less cumbersome reporting he can achieve using Perl scripts.
To address the cost issue, Coulter and Michaels emphasize the need for "reusability value" in the information collected by SRM tools, which provide the means to retrieve a lot of stats about storage and data. These metrics can provide a foundation for other tasks, such as compliance and governance policy making and monitoring, file classification, and storage tiering. While Tek-Tools CEO Ken Barth agrees with the reuse potential of SRM data, he takes the pragmatic position that ease of installation and the ability to solve immediate needs quickly are most important. Too many SRM purchases result in software gathering dust on the shelf because no one has the time, budget, or manpower to undertake a deployment.
Dean Snyder from HP's Business Server Automation Group articulates a list of criteria, including the number of agents required, depth of heterogeneous vendor support, integration with enterprise management tools, and business app and cluster/virtual machine awareness. Snyder also adds to the list "viability of the supplier," which strikes us as a marketing tactic intended to dissuade readers from choosing SRM products offered by startups and small companies, such as Olocity. Don't discount smaller vendors--many are thinking outside the proprietary box. One such interesting company is MonoSphere, which is set to release technology to tag storage with equipment value, so you can see the cost not only to store data on a platform, but of inefficient use of that capacity.
DOES VIRTUALIZATION HELP OR HURT SRM?
Despite still-modest levels of VM adoption, a consistent trend in most vendor questionnaires involves the need to deploy SRM to support virtual machine environments fromMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Virtual Iron, VMware, and others. In fact, Network Appliance (NSDQ: NTAP)'s chief marketing officer, Jay Kid, puts "support for VM consolidation" on his list of top selection criteria.
When we dug deeper into why claims about support for VMware, Hyper-V, or SAN virtualization figured so prominently in responses, the consensus was that virtualization neither helps nor hurts the efficacy of SRM; it all comes down to whether the virtual server or storage architecture was designed and rolled out with management in mind. Of course, storage vendors also are eager to take advantage of the increasing interest in virtualization by showing how their offerings can add value to virtual platforms.
"Competitive 2008 SRM tools will need to discover, report, and map storage resources that are attached to a virtual host," says HP's Snyder. Most vendors expect steadily increasing deployment of server virtualization, meaning better-than-even odds they'll run into storage attached to a number of physical hosts under virtual machine management. Lack of VM support, Snyder says, will make accurate capacity and utilization reporting impossible and produce topology maps that don't properly stitch VM hosts to their associated storage resources. This complicates provisioning, performance management, troubleshooting, and more.
The vendors are split over the impact of virtualization on SRM efficacy, with CA's Coulter arguing that storage virtualization, at least, is making storage management more complex and difficult without adding value. In fact, the return on investment expected from server virtualization may actually be compromised by the lack of storage resource management, according to Tek-Tools' Barth. "Studies have shown that the majority of companies that virtualize their servers are actually seeing an increase in the growth of their storage spending due to a lack of visibility into their storage environments," he says. Without SRM, virtualizing servers "is like driving with blindfolds on."
Sean Derrington, Symantec's director of storage and availability management, agrees, adding that virtualization complicates storage management by introducing a layer of abstraction that reduces visibility from the application to the spindle. It's incumbent on SRM vendors to map VMs to the hypervisor and provide application-to-spindle visibility. Virtual logical unit numbers also present management challenges that SRM products must address.
Jamie Clifton, BridgeHead Software's director of business development, takes a slightly offbeat view of the benefits of SRM in the virtual world: That virtualization helps companies keep legacy gear in play longer and, with the help of SRM, lets new applications use older devices and storage methodologies. SRM is a prerequisite, from his perspective, to obtaining real value from virtualization.
Northern Software CEO Thomas Vernersson agrees about the potential benefits accrued to virtualization and the additional layer of flexibility it provides within storage architecture design. Done properly, he argues, virtualization allows the storage infrastructure to be organized in a more logical way, in turn making SRM policies easier to design and deploy.
"HP no longer sees any major impediments for mapping heterogeneous storage infrastructure," says Snyder. "We're very satisfied with our progress."
Unfortunately, none of his colleagues who responded to our survey share his view that storage management nirvana has arrived, or will in the near future. The fact is, any vendor will promise soup-to-nuts storage management--if you buy only its brand of storage. For example, the tools HP uses for managing Compaq EVA storage are not portable to managing the storage it rebrands from others, such as Hitachi Data Systems. Similarly, EMC's ECC SRM tools work well with some of its product lines--DMX, for example--but not as well with Clariion. The idea of SRM is that it is an inclusive management approach, not an exclusive one. This is an area where standards from the SNIA's SMI-S effort were supposed to save us. However, while it has been adopted as an international standard, SMI-S hasn't delivered on unified storage management. The fault is not in the spec, says Olocity CEO Roger Reich, who worked on the management approach from its earliest days and now seeks to build a business around helping vendors and consumers deploy and use the technology. Rather, SMI-S is hobbled by implementation. "[SMI-S] interfaces need to be easier to deploy and need better quality and completeness," Reich says.
Without effective "providers" (the SMI-S component that's supposed to provide monitoring and configuration access to storage gear), the underlying infrastructure of SRM tools is a rat's nest of millions of lines of code that integrates another rat's nest of disparate vendor proprietary interfaces that have horrible reliability. Reich adds that conventional SRM interfaces have wildly differing degrees of function and usually render SRM software a net efficiency drag to an IT shop using multivendor configurations.
Reich's views are echoed by nearly all other respondents. John Foley, IBM's TotalStorage Productivity Center marketing manager, decries proprietary systems and the lack of APIs as a source of vendor lock-in--not that IBM is opening its APIs to the world.
The upshot: IT must insist that vendors provide in their SRM products streamlined mechanisms to collect information and interact with storage gear. Today, the best we can hope for is a kludge of "hooks" ranging from proprietary APIs to SNMP MIBs. Vendors remain reluctant to provide open management interfaces that might contribute to the commoditization of storage gear and facilitate replacement of Brand X's box with Brand Y's less expensive system.
SHOW US THE MONEY
Still, Tek Tools' Barth remains optimistic that server consolidation and virtualization technologies are providing an education to IT departments regarding the merits of centralized management. In his view, control is shifting to enterprise IT groups, which in the coming few years will compel storage vendors to make good on interoperability. BridgeHead's Clifton also finds reason for optimism in the increasing popularity of Web services and the move toward SOA.
But storage vendors have stonewalled in the face of other open standards pushes, so why should now be any different? It won't, unless enterprises assert themselves and demand standards. This is likely to happen only after IT is convinced that SRM will yield measurable improvements in the things that matter: operational efficiency, cost savings, and risk reduction.
For SRM to gain this credibility, organizations need statistics showing efficiency gains from enabling fewer storage admins to do more via automation. But none of the vendors we talked to could point to a definitive survey or empirical analysis supporting cost savings or efficiency improvements.
"I'm not aware of any analytical studies of the actual human efficiency gains of implementing and using a large SRM solution versus the cost of using individual hardware element managers and operating system features," says Olocity's Reich, with some frustration.
In the absence of meaningful data points, vendors resort to anecdotal evidence. We've all heard these pitches and have learned to take them with some skepticism. Northern Software's Vernersson cites an SRM study his company performed for one of Scandinavia's largest financial institutions. "It was estimated that 32% of primary storage capacity would be reclaimed during the first six weeks after deployment, and that growth rate reductions of more than 40% would push back initially scheduled capacity investments by more than 18 months. The first-year savings alone were estimated at more than $400,000."
A few vendors offer calculators--CA, HP, and IBM have ROI analysis tools, for example--to help customers predict their potential gains from SRM. Only Tek-Tools' Barth would go on the record to state that his Storage Profiler product delivers the 40% savings in operational costs touted by Gartner nearly a decade ago. He says his customers have individually and collectively realized at least that large of a reduction in total storage costs via a combination of operational savings and infrastructure allocation efficiency improvements following deployment of his product.