Today NetApp announced the latest version of our SANscreen product, SANscreen 5.0. This is a big release that enhances, what I think is, the best heterogeneous SRM product.
Delivering a service oriented view of storage
We are in the process of watching the evolution of storage from an interesting set of devices with capabilities to a service driven infrastructure. What do I mean by service driven infrastructure? Prosaically, it's the aggregation of a set of capabilities, things like performance, reliability, protocol, cost and a commitment that the storage will provide those capabilities, also known as the Service Level Agreement.
For some companies this has already happened. For others, it's a work in progress.
One of the key challenges is how to provide the visibility into the storage tier to ensure that the services promised are the services delivered.
SANscreen, originally built by Onaro, has continued to evolve and extend it's core value proposition, the ability to quickly and easily see what is going on throughout the storage infrastructure. Using an agentless infrastructure, SANscreen is able to see more, faster and more reliably than any other tool.
Building on top of this very efficient data collection mechanism, SANscreen allows storage teams to monitor the service levels of their storage infrastructure.
So what's new?
The latest release extends SANscreen in three interesting ways:
- A data warehousing infrastructure that allow storage architects to slice and dice their data
- Extend SANscreen to iSCSI infrastructures.
- Deliver the kind of analytic tools necessary to execute a storage tiering strategy.
It's more than just an FC world out there, and any SRM tool needs to understand iSCSI infrastructure. And SANscreen is no different.
Storage architects that have used SANscreen understand how providing visibility into the infrastructure in an almost real time way makes it possible to mange the storage sprawl. Onaro got it's start clarifying the complex SAN fabrics that were put together over the last decade.
An increasingly important part of the storage landscape is iSCSI. An increasingly challenging part of deploying iSCSI is how to manage the fabric and the storage attached to that fabric.
With the latest release of SANscreen, NetApp is providing a tool that although not providing an end-to-end fabric view, does provide insight into the fabric end-points.
When you're flush, time is money, so you spend money to save time. When you're short on cash you spend time to save money. The trick is to get enough bang for the buck for the time you spend.
Storage analysts talk about the need to have a comprehensive storage tiering strategy that spans the entire enterprise, and then stare dumbly as storage architects ask the inevitable question; how? Hetero SRM tools never really got enough information to be useful, homogeneous tools only told you how to use their stuff effectively.
And don't get me started on the question of FC vs iSCSI. Never mind what is real FC, how about the basic question of how much FC do I need and how much iSCSI do I need?
To produce a reasonable tiering strategy you need complete, up-to-date, comprehensive data and the analytics necessary to do something with that data. SANscreen has always had the comprehensive, up-to-date and complete part covered, now we added the analytics.
What exactly do I mean by analytics?
- Provide reports into how capacity is being used
- Map capacity used by business group to some notion of dollars per terabyte.
Using both of these mechanisms it's possible to understand the current behavior in your storage infrastructure, and more importantly change it.
Let's be precise, if you want to drive to a particular global view of $/TB, understanding what's going is the first step. But once you have that information, it's really important to act on it. And once you've acted on the information see what happened.
I call this the find, act, verify cycle of storage management.
Too many tools make the find and verify phase an unending adventure. Make those two phases quick and painless, and you'll spend more time doing and less time trying to figure out what to do. Net result, you'll get more efficiency out of your infrastructure.
What's really interesting is that when you combine SANscreen's ability to monitor storage SLA's with the new tiering tools, it becomes possible to correctly identify storage that is on the wrong tier. And even better, if storage is moved to the wrong tier, then the storage group can discover that and move the storage back without having to deal with the dreaded scream at storage group, storage group fixes problem, scream storage group for creating problem cycle.
But for any tiering strategy to be effective, the consumer has to be involved. And that's where SANscreen's new charge back capabilities come into play.
If you measure behavior, and show how the measured behavior is deviating from the goal, you'd be surprised at how quickly the behavior moves towards the goal.
For more information check out the website where you'll find a couple of new whitepapers that describe the product in more detail.
