Tag Archives: management

RTFM

Storage Networking No Comments

Yeah its been a while. A lot has happened in two years. One thing that really jumps out is I moved Down Under. Yep, now inhabitant of kangarooland and I’ve loved every day of it.

To storage:
You don’t want to know how many questions I get who’s answers have been perfectly described in all sorts of manuals. This almost leads to the point were my job becomes a manual reader and a walking storage encyclopedia. 🙂 Now that’s something to put on my CV.


The big problem is however with so many different (storage) products and related documentation I can understand the problem storage admins have these days. Storage infrastructures become more and more complex and an ever increasing level of knowledge is required to maintain all of this. Take into account all different updates these guys get from their vendors almost on a monthly basis then you can imagine what their workday looks like. My life is pretty easy. I only have to keep track of around 80 software products and approx 15 storage hardware platforms because I work for one of those vendors. Multiply that by an average of around 17 manuals per product between 10 and over 5000 (yes, five-thousand) pages and …… you do the maths. Take into account that I also need to know what happens on a OS level from an IO stack perspective including all the different virtualisation kit that is out there including Mainframe z/OS so this pretty much sums up my daily life.. 😉

No, I’m not pitying myself. I have a fantastic wife, wonderful kids and good job, so I’m quite happy with what’s going on in my life.

Going back to the storage admins. The big difference between them and myself is I have access to all the information I need plus some competitive information of my com-colleagues. The storage admins totally rely of what the vendors want them to have and that very often is extremely restricted. I can understand that a lot of this is market sensitive and belongs as company confidential behind locks, however I also think that we should give the right information/documentation (in any form you like) in a structured and easy to understand format without the nitty/gritty stuff that is totally irrelevant. This will easy the burden which a lot of you guys out there suffer and believe me I’ve been there.

A second way of sharing experiences and knowledge is user communities. The perfect example for me has always been Encompass or DECUS. The best user community ever, affiliated to Digital Equipment Corporation. (HP still picks the fruit from that). I think it’s extremely important that vendor should provide a platform were their users can share expierences (good or bad) and be able to leverage the knowledge of his/her peers.

One of my primary tasks, besides being a technical conscience to my sales reps, is to provide my customers (you storage admins) with all the information they need and to help them manage the kit I sold them so they can be heroes within their company.

TTY later.

Greetz,
Erwin

Addres space vs. Dynamic allocation

General Info No Comments

This article is somewhat a successor to my first blog “The future of storage”. I discussed my article with Vincent Franceschini personally a while ago and although we have some different opinions on some topics, in general we agree on the setting we have to get more insight on the business value of data. This is the only way we can shift the engineering world to a more business focused mindset. Unfortunately today the engineering departments of all the major storage vendors still rely on old protocols like SCSI, NFS, CIFS which all have some sort of limitation which generally is address space.

To put this in perspective it’s like building a road with a certain amount of length and width which has a capacity for a certain number of cars per hour. This means it cannot adapt dynamically to a higher load i.e. more cars. You have to build new roads, or construct new lanes to existing ones if possible at all, to cater for more cars. With the growth of data and the changes companies are facing today it’s time to come up with something new. Basically this means we have to step away from technologies which have limitations build into their architecture. Although this might look like boiling the ocean I think we cannot afford the luxury of trying to improve current standards while the “data boom” is running like an avalanche.
Furthermore it is becoming too hard for IT department to keep up with the knowledge needed in every segment.

Question is “How do we accomplish this”. In my opinion the academic world together with the IT industry have huge potential in developing the next generation of IT. In current IT environments we run into barriers of all sorts. Performance, capacity, energy supply, etc etc.

So here’s an idea. Basically every word known to mankind has been written millions of times. So why do we need to write it over and over again. Basically what can be done is reference these words to compose an article. This leads to both a reduction of storage capacity needed as well as a reference-able index which can be searched on. The information of the index can be in a SNIA XAM format which also enables storage systems to leverage this information and dynamically allocate the required capacity or put business values to these indexes. This way the only thing that needs to be watched for is the integrity of the indexes and the words catalog. Another benefit of this is when a certain word changes it’s spelling the only thing that needs to be changed is that same word in the catalog. Since all articles just have references to this word the spelling is adjusted accordingly. (I’ll bet I will get some comments about that. :-))

As you can see this kind of information storage and retrieval totally eliminates the use of de-duplication, everything is written once anyway, which in turn has a major benefit on storage infrastructures, data integrity, authority etc etc. Since the indexes itself don’t have to grow because of auto elimination based on business value the concept of Dynamic Allocation has been achieved. OK, there are some caveats on the different formats, languages and overlapping context issues however these can be taken care of by linguists.

The Smarter Storage Admin (Work Smarter not Longer)

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Lets start off with a question: Who is the best storage admin?
1. The one that starts at 07:00 AM and leaves at 18:00 PM
2. The one that starts at 09:00 AM and leaves at 16:00 PM

Two simple answers but they can make a world of difference to employers. Whenever an employer answers with no. 1 they often have the remark that this admin does a lot more work and is more loyal to the company. They might be right however the daily time spent at work is not a good qualifier for productivity so the amount of work done might be less than no.2. This means that an employer has to measure on other points and define clear milestones that have to be fulfilled.


Whenever I visit customers I often get the complaint that they spend too much time doing day to day administration like digging through log files, checking status messages, restoring files or emails etc. etc. These activities can occupy more than 60% of an administrators day which can be avoided.
To be more efficient one has to change the mindset from knowing all to knowing what doesn’t work. It’s a very simple principle however to get there you have to do a lot planning.
An example is when a server reboots do I want to know if the switch port goes offline? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. It all depends on what the impact of that server is. Is it planned or not or maybe this server belongs to a test environment in which case I don’t want to get a phone-call in the middle of the night at all.

The software and hardware in a storage environment consists of many different components and they all have to work together. The primary goal of such an environment is to move bytes back and forth to disk, tape or another medium and they do that pretty well nowadays. The problem however is management of all these different components which require all different management tools, learning tracks and operation procedures. Even if we shift our mindset to “What doesn’t work”, we still have to spend a lot of time and effort in thing we often don’t want to know.

Currently there are no tools available who support the whole range of hardware and software so for specific tasks we still need the tools the vendors provide. However for day to day administration there are some good tools which might be very beneficial for administrators. These tools can save more than 40% of an administrators time so they can do more work in less time. It takes a simple calculation to determine the ROI and another pro is that the chances of making mistakes is drastically reduced.

Another thing to consider is if these tools fit into the business processes if these are defined within a company. Does the company have ITIL, Prince2 or any other method of IT service management in place. If so the storage management tool has to align to these processes since we don’t want to do things twice.

Last but not least is the support for open standards. The SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) is an non-profit organization which was founded by some storage vendors in the late 90’s. The SNIA works in conjunction with its members around the globe to make storage networking technologies understandable, simpler to implement, easier to manage, and recognized as a valued asset to business. One of the standards ,which was recently certified by ANSI, is SMI-S. This standard defines a very large subset of storage components which can be managed through a single common methodology. This means that you’ll get one common view of all your storage assets with the ability to manage it through a single interface independent of the vendor. If your storage management tool is based on this standard you do not have a vendor lock-in and day to day operations will be more efficient.
This implies however that the vendor also has to support the SMI-S standard so make sure you make the right choice if you are looking for a storage solution and ask the vendor if he supports the SMI-S standard and to what extend.

Greetz,
Erwin