Storage change management software maker Onaro Inc. recently
held the first of what will become an annual customer panel in
Boston for users to discuss their concerns.A key response from nearly all attendees was that
capacity planning "remains a dark art."
Spreadsheets and guesswork are the cornerstones even with
storage resource management (SRM) tools
deployed, they said.
No press were allowed at the event, but SearchStorage.com
tracked down one of the users who was present for these
discussions, Michael Passe, storage manager for CareGroup
Healthcare System, a consortium of hospitals in eastern
Massachusetts. He gave us some insight into the discussions that
took place there.
SearchStorage.com: Let's start with the 'capacity planning
remains a dark art' bit. What does that mean? Why do you think that
is?
Michael Passe: Getting all the information you really need
to do capacity planning remains very, very difficult. Host-based
agents for information gathering are still prone to human error,
such as forgetting to install them. Advanced configurations, like
server clusters, are still counted multiple times by many
monitoring tools. And if you have a heterogeneous environment,
forget it.
What users really want to know is, 'where do I put my next dollar'?
It's still a guess as to what you're going to need next.
SearchStorage: What about the effectiveness of SRM
tools?
Passe: SRM is good as a concept but it still doesn't really
work. Heterogeneous products like AppIQ [Inc.] have a really broad
scope, but they don't get deep enough into the array. A product
like EMC [Corp.]'s ControlCenter gets really deep into an EMC
array, but it's stuck there -- it doesn't have all the features for
other people's products. It doesn't have that broad scope. Clariion
and Symmetrix arrays are still easier to manage through their own
interfaces.
SearchStorage: Is that what leads to users not using the
single-pane-of-glass tools when they're available, as the group
discussed?
Passe: There's a lot of marketing hype out there, but in a
complex environment the reality is it may not work for you. The
less vanilla your configuration, the less effective a
single-pane-of-glass approach is likely to be. I even got EMC to
fess up to me that since my configurations are somewhat complex,
their SRM tools have some trouble with that. I have 50 million
other things to do -- it would be nice if the tools delivered on
their promise and went that last mile. But I don't have time to
wrestle with them.
SearchStorage: What tools have you used?
Passe: I've tried services from StorageTek and IBM's Global
Services. I also tried Storability, and I thought their version 4.0
was going to deliver more features, but I got tired of waiting for
it. They just couldn't get the code out the door fast enough. I've
used a reporting product from EMC called StorageScope, which does
ad hoc reports -- it's difficult to get what you want out of it.
SearchStorage: EMC announced in April that its Smarts network
fault-correlation software now supports Fibre Channel [FC]
networks. How does that compare to Onaro?
Passe: I think EMC's product is going to fall in the same
realm, in combination with [storage area network] SAN Advisor, but
today I don't think they are where Onaro is -- I see them trying to
grow their business into that space, but at the same time, Onaro is
growing their business too.
Onaro is becoming a more mature software. It still takes a day
or so to set up but it's becoming more shrinkwrapped -- and it
doesn't require a lot of long-term maintenance. Right now EMC's
product is more like Symantec [Corp.]'s correlation software -- it
does great root-cause analysis, but it doesn't do future modeling,
which is something Onaro does pretty uniquely today.
SearchStorage: Have you tried the AppIQ products?Passe: No. The integration isn't quite deep enough for me.
SearchStorage: What led you to Onaro's tool?
Passe: It's not really an SRM tool -- it's complementary to
SRM tools, but it does some basic SRM functions if you don't own
anything already. Onaro just helps you understand your
configuration. In a complex environment, you need to understand if
you're doing the right thing with provisioning and maintaining
redundancy, and the bigger you get, it's no longer possible to keep
track on paper or in my head where everything is and what we have
in our environment, let alone if it's set up correctly.
Following the meeting, Onaro issued a press release outlining
some of the conclusions reached about the state of the storage
industry in the course of the discussion, which included:
- Improving change management and integrating more closely with
infrastructure management is a key priority for many
organizations.
- Maintaining and deploying conventional SRM solutions continues
to be a challenge due to the maintenance and deployment of agents.
Most attendees "have scaled back expectations of the benefits of
SRM."
- Single panel provisioning is not being used by storage
administrators even when available. Most administrators prefer
custom scripts and command line interfaces.