In the spirit of storage - Cover Story

Communications News, August, 2003 by Drew Robb

"Centralized storage management, exception-based reporting throughout our network and capacity planning seemed like they were designed with our situation in mind," explains Madewell.

Before purchase, he loaded a demo copy on one server to test the product. He copied data to determine the amount of time that could be saved in server and storage management. Madewell then asked the SWS IT director to view the results before he approved the purchase.

LOW COST, QUICK RESULTS

Madewell says BrightStor SRM came in at less than $10,000--about $4,000 for software, $2,000 for maintenance and the rest for agents to place on nine servers used principally for storage. CA Services personnel came on site for two days to assist with installation and configuration.

Once installed, SWS immediately eliminated almost 25 gigabytes of data from nine servers. Backup times, too, have decreased markedly. A full backup now takes a day less and a differential backup is speeded up each day by a few hours. In North California, he reports, the amount of data backed up has dropped from 400 gigabytes to 300 gigabytes.

"As a result of the improvements in storage management, we haven't had a server down due to storage issues in almost a year," says Madewell. "Additionally, we haven't needed to add any more servers in order to provide user storage."

Reporting functionality, he says, is perhaps the greatest benefit to SWS. Reports are scheduled each night. When IT personnel come to work the next day, they can instantly view the state of storage resources and take action accordingly.

"Instead of reacting to the latest storage flap or downed server, we can now see what's happening ahead of time and be proactive about resolution," he offers.

By looking at reports, Madewell and his staff isolate offending corporate storage policies. The reports are forwarded to the department heads, who determine which files can be safely deleted. The next day, IT checks to verify the files are gone or takes further action.

CUSTOMIZATION PROVED DIFFICULT

SWS did encounter a few issues with BrightStor SRM, centered mainly around reporting and, in particular, the language used to write scripts-enterprise definition language (EDL). Madewell calls the basic reports that come with the product "quite good," but he required customization to find out what he really needed to know each day. The first elaborate script he tried to assemble took him almost 90 minutes. He had to rely on CA Services staff to author several scripts and teach him some of the basics of the language.

"The basic reports were a bit too high level for us, so we needed more granular data, such as file owner name and a list of the top 20 storage users," says Madewell. "As we didn't know EDL, the syntax was the biggest killer and learning it proved to be really challenging."

While help from CA Services on scripting and EDL syntax on version 6.2 of BrightStor SRM was needed, Madewell notes that version 6.3 comes with a scripting wizard to bypass the need to know EDL. He can now complete complex scripts in five to 10 minutes without error.