I think this lack of strategic thinking is a reaction to the reality of life in IT rather than any deficiency on the part of IT folks. Modern distributed-systems (read UNIX and Windows) IT infrastructure managers are treated like second-class citizens – “here, watch this stuff while I do some real work.” They have little real knowledge of the applications they supposedly support (even IT applications people have little to do with infrastructure folk) and thus are totally unable to appropriately manage systems, especially storage.

Imagine is your rich uncle gave you a garage half full of blank boxes and said “keep this all safe for me, but don’t look inside the boxes, ok?” Then every few days he came by and handed you some more blank boxes, some heavy, some misshapen, but all unknown. After a year or so, you came to him and said “ummm, the garage is full and I don’t know what to do!” His reaction would, of course, be “I told you to manage it!” Then, patronizingly, “very well, I’ll get you another garage…”

Sound like the storage industry? We simply cannot be strategic until we know more about the data we are storing, and that means we have to muscle our way to a seat at the grand business applications table. This is the true challenge of IT in the coming years, not green computing or ILM or any of those other supposedly strategic things we focus on.

But all of these pseudo-strategy we do presents an opportunity. Take on a challenge like ILM with a data classification or tiered storage project. Put your results in front of Management – real business management, not the VP of IT operations or whatever. Show them that you do have the ability to form complex thoughts and ask for their input. You might even get invited to the table…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | A Seat At the Table
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I guess the razor wire only went one way, eh Storagezilla?  Now if only every other storage management product was VM-savvy…

Update: Looks like EMC announced VMware compatability in ControlCenter 6.0 back in May.  I’d love to learn more about just how well these two products work in the real world.  Anyone using them?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | SRM For VMware (Thank God!)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

These days, when another parent at the soccer game or church asks what I do for a living, I go through a little semantic dance.  I start with business consulting, move on to big companies and their computer systems, and finally mutter something about data storage.  If I told them I consulted in the field of enterprise storage, they’d probably think of big parking lots and a rental car agency.  It was different in Massachusetts, of course.  There, I could just say ” the stuff EMC does” and they would have a pretty good idea.

But EMC, and Massachusetts, is not the real world, bringing me to today’s topic: information, data, and storage.  We are storage people, and we work in the storage industry, but storage is not important to the world at large.  They think about information, first, and occasionally about data.  Mostly, our industry is a negative in the real world: “my computer died and I lost my data”, or “my credit card company lost a tape of personal data”.

Even in business, nobody cares about ILM, virtualization, thin provisioning, iSCSI, or any of the topics that we spend all our time focused on.  Data storage is a necessity to build cars, drill for oil, sell mortgages, and so on.  If they can do these things efficiently without so much IT infrastructure and investment, then they probably would.  In the meantime, they’ll keep the lights on the IT until something else better comes along.

What can we do?  Well, we had better start by making sure that we are as valuable to the business as we possibly can be, keeping in mind that data storage should never be a priority at a major company.  We need to keep more humility, realizing that the business cares about information, knows about data, and ignores storage, and this is really how it should be.  We need to make sure that we take care of the business data entrusted to us, and that we keep the storage infrastructure out of the way.

We can do this by focusing our efforts in two ways: make sure our data storage infrastructures are bulletproof, and help the business understand our data storage capabilities on their terms.  Storage technology, and storage managers, are getting pretty good at keeping things working.  So let’s stop putting so much attention on the latest and greatest storage devices, and start thinking about better ways to care for the data that has been entrusted to us.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Information, Data, and Storage
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world, and those who don’t.” 

This week, EMC’s Chief Development Officer, Mark Lewis, posted a thoughtful blog “episode” supposing that there are two kinds of data in this world: OLTP and all of the rest.  It’s an interesting idea, so let’s bat it around a little.

Mark claims that, as technology allows data to be better structured and classified, the old distinction between structured and unstructured will disappear.  Surely, many types of unstructured data are gaining tagging and searchability as they move into a networked world.  E-mail is clearly semi-structured at least, and on-line document repositories like SharePoint and Google Docs have followed in the footsteps of Lotus Notes and others to bring structure to the file server.  I know of lots of businesses with historical applications that are transitioning to structured, tiered, and archivable formats, as well.  So we’re certainly moving in that direction, but I think it’s too soon to say that unstructured data is at an end.

I doubt that Mr. Lewis believes that all data is structured, either.  His job is to make sure that EMC does not become irrelevant like so many other big Massachusetts technology companies, so he’s certainly trying to get in front of the market.  As data gains structure, storage products that exploit it will undoubtedly be in demand.  So EMC is wise to work on XAM and to purchase XHive.  But I doubt that the bulk of their revenues will come from storage systems integrated with data structures anytime soon.

The core of Mr. Lewis’s discussion revolves around classifying data according to performance, and latency in particular: his OLTP type needs each transaction to flow quickly, while his “web” type is characterized by other attributes.  This metadata would be communicated to the storage system through some structured mechanism like XML.

Undoubtedly, latency is one way to divide up the world of data.  But is this single element, the low latency requirements of OLTP applications, truly a valid way to characterize the entire wide world of data?  It seems to me an excellent way to isolate one data type, but I believe that there are many others which also need isolation, examination, and tuned storage services.  I understand the argument that OLTP systems need exceptional storage, but I don’t feel that this distinction suggested by Mr. Lewis is the correct way to split enterprise data.

Me?  I believe there are lots more than two kinds of people in this world.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | There Are Two Kinds…
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I’ve been in the trenches on storage content (aka data) for a long time. I, too, have often reverted to the old “gigs of MP3s and porn” argument from time to time. But I’ve done enough filesystem assessments at real companies to realize that that’s not really the norm. In fact, I’ve rarely found much porn, music, video, or jokes on full-up corporate file servers. And I’ve analyzed enough storage environments to know that, while file servers are big, they’re not normally the majority user of storage in large data centers.

On the contrary, most enterprise storage is taken up by business applications, though not necessarily critical data. Email, backup, and certainly user file servers are big space users. But give me a few Oracle instances, source code repositories, or image processing servers, and watch those applications shrink in significance.

No matter what the application, though, the real issue with storage growth (and ILM) is the (in)ability of IT managers to do anything about it. Let’s say we had permission to delete really inappropriate data, which is not a sure thing. Would we IT folks even be able to recognize it? How would we locate it? Can we even view user files without violating user trust, company privacy policies, or even laws? Many countries (yes, not all data is in the USA), regulate access to data even inside a company.

Now let’s move into grayer areas of “unnecessary” corporate data. Many storage administrators can’t even name the applications that take up all that space, let alone understand the intricacies of the data under management.  To make a timely (and tired) Harry Potter analogy, IT are the house-elves of the business – powerful but subservient, with little input into what happens above and around them.  I’ve talked to business people who don’t want IT to have any input, relegating them to order takers and laborers.

This is a dangerous slide, however.  Lots of people have the capability to take IT orders and keep the lights on,  a realization that leads to outsourcing.  IT pros must prove their worth to the business in order to remain relevant and irreplaceable!

ILM is one way to do that.  To get back to Chuck’s post, we need to take the reins and try to understand data better.  We need to pick certain applications that lend themselves to automated data classification and tiered storage and try to get them under control.  Email is a great candidate, and that’s why email archiving applications have taken off recently.  File servers are coming along, too, especially with file virtualization in the ascendancy.

I’m particularly excited about what a smart IT manager I know called the “second wave” of SRM tools.  Rather than just collecting stock metadata (age, name, owner, etc), the latest filesystem scanning tools look inside a file, trying to better classify them.  Let’s say 1/4 of your file server is made up of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.  What can you do about that unless you can identify which are critical and which are not?  Each business will have its own criteria, and you need a flexible tool to scan them all and report back to you before you can “ILM” them.  That’s what lots of software vendors are currently working on, and though we’re at an early stage still, the results are promising.

Sadly, though, we in IT may soon find that we just can’t delete anything.  Even totally banned content like porn could be critical to a legal case against an employee,  and it won’t be long before we are expected to keep everything that shows up on our servers for a very long time.  Most companies have policies for hardcopy document retention, and many are currenyly diving into the world of data policy as well.  The default policy may be “keep until we decide what to do with it”, and this could cause the current trend of storage growth to accelerate!

If we can’t delete data, we will be forced to sail the Titanic rather than sink it.  Small companies can benefit most from the falling price of storage, since the entire storage footprint for a little shop is often under a terabyte.  But larger organizations will find that they need to start tiering their storage, and quickly in order to keep prices under control.

And then there’s green storage.   Again, Mr. Toigo makes the very valid point that the problem is in the business, not in the hardware we use.  But if we can’t do anything about data growth for the time being, we had better start tackling the technical challenges we face.  I’ve talked to many IT folks who are very worried about data center space, as well as the terrifying trio of heat, power, and cooling.  For them, green technologies are no laughing matter!  If you can’t get any more power, you have to lower your per-GB requirement and quickly.

It’s easy to say “understand your data and delete some”, but hard for IT pros to  actually do it.  Until we can tackle the strategic issue of data growth, we’ll have to continue fighting the tactical problems of storage.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Sailing the Titanic (Why We Need ILM and Then Some!)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.