Intelligent storage provisioning takes a load off: automated provisioning tools in short supply

Computer Technology Review, May, 2003 by Christine Taylor Chudnow

Computer provisioning has been around since the inception of computers-computers produce data, and data must have somewhere to live. The process of providing that space is called provisioning. Before data started growing so quickly, provisioning was not a big deal--stick on a few disks or RAID arrays and go from there. Then things started to get dicey: fast-growing transaction databases gobbled up storage and drove their administrators crazy; LANs kept running out of room and kept network managers hopping; SAN and NAS never seemed to have enough storage in the right places. In a knee-jerk response, many administrators slammed on way too many storage devices and provisioned them all at once, just to keep from having to do it all over again in six months--or six weeks. Not only did this lower return on investment, administrators had to spend large amounts of time configuring and attaching hardware storage devices to the network.

Provisioning in clusters and messaging networks was bad enough. In many-to-many architected SANs, it was worse. Provisioning the storage area network not only meant spending hours hooking up new devices, it also involved remapping dozens of network components between hosts and arrays. The resulting staff hours were no joke, since manual storage provisioning can take as much as 50 labor-intensive steps and several days of an expert's time.

Storage Provisioning

Even when administrators adopted virtualization, they still spent a huge amount of time provisioning the virtual volumes. It got better--they didn't run out of room so quickly and could do better capacity management--but they were still stuck with manual remapping. This is where intelligent storage provisioning comes in: software tools that use a virtualization base to aid administrators to use their storage volumes without a huge amount of manual activities. Ranging from simple GUI-based movement and wizards to policy-driven automated tools, storage provisioning can help to relieve a good deal of administrative burden from if. Stephen Foskett, senior consultant at Glasshouse Technologies said about provisioning, "Right now it's extremely difficult to do this kind of thing. Without automated provisioning tools, [you] have to make changes in at least three different places to make changes to the host." Changes affect all aspects of the storage network path, including arrays, ports, HBAs, switches, fabric, LUN masking software, volume managers and hosts. Foskett added, "Automated provisioning software does those things for me and it does it the same way virtualization tools would have done it, but better, by showing me what I have."

Provisioning

Storage administrators can map business services Onto the storage pool. Business services are the requirements born from an application's demands and priority status in the corporation. By understanding the application's requirements for network and processor types, software, and storage, administrators can apply those requirements to the virtualized resources. For example, a critical database application with large transaction spikes may have a disk threshold of 50 percent capacity. When data storage reaches 50 percent of its assigned storage, the provisioning software alerts the administrator, who can then assign additional storage from available pools.

Policy and automation is the next step in provisioning and often accompanies it. It works by capturing provisioning information, applying states to policy thresholds, and growing or shrinking space allocations as necessary. Most of these tools allow different degrees of automation depending on IT's comfort level.

Not all development centers around these three separate pieces. Jean Banko, Fujitsu Softek's director of product marketing said, 'There are different levels of maturity that you go through. Provisioning goes through many steps depending on your application." Provisioning development generally falls into a maturing continuum, from simplest to most complex:

1. Application-aware provisioning: Application-aware provisioning runs across virtualized volumes and delivers business services by adapting storage to application needs--for example, allowing if to input threshold requirements for specific applications and data. When the data or service levels reach threshold capacity or drop below service level performance, the provisioning software alerts the administrator. Intelligent provisioning often runs across virtualized volumes, which gives it greater flexibility in managing storage areas, and provides tools to simplify or partially automate certain provisioning tasks.

2. Policy-driven automated provisioning: Automated provisioning builds on the previous development by automating provisioning procedures according to user-set business policies. Policy automation automatically maintains application service level objectives by assigning and configuring paths and storage space to applications depending on their threshold levels. It can also automate many provisioning steps when if expands the storage network.