The 7 Deadly Sins of Storage Management Bob Zimmerman Director, Storage Research Giga Information Group

Agenda The Original 7 Walking through the Abuse of Storage Contrary Virtues Techniques and Savings Summary

The Original 7 Gluttony Anger Envy Greed Lust Pride Sloth

Gluttony... or why can’t I keep it all Inordinate desire to consume more than required The sys admin who had 9 OS generations on disk The user who kept every file he ever touched My inbox Solution: Strict life-cycle management

Anger…it’s all your fault Manifested by an individual who ignores life’s positives and opts instead for fury User complaining about response time “What do you mean my data isn’t recoverable” Solution: Managed Service Level Agreements

Envy…I deserve it all Desire for another’s position/possession Why does her work get priority How come I’m here in the data center 24x7 Solution: Automated policy management with exception handling

Greed…need it or not, its mine Desire for material advantage Every dot-com that’s come and gone I want everything in my data warehouse Take over my departmental system, but... Solution: Enterprise-wide, consolidated IT

Lust…just give me the latest & greatest Inordinate craving for the toys of life Who gets the sleek new laptop Why do the network gurus get the 10Gbs links Solution: Manage storage for business ROI, not overhead cost

Pride…I’d rather do it myself Excessive belief in one's own abilities The manual?, who needs directions ‘tar’ and ‘cpio’ are everything you need I ran the 1 st pre-beta on my block Solution: Get rid of the “wild ducks”

Sloth…let the other guy do it Avoiding physical or ethereal work Keeping documentation current Testing all those DR backups I need 2 TB for that new app…tomorrow! Solution: Treat IT, especially storage, as a business asset, with measurable, reportable ROI

The Contrary Virtues Denial Patience Kindness Sharing Charity Humility Diligence

Typical Storage Admin Workloads Mainframe TB FTE –Really 1.5 FTEs shop –DFSMS fully implemented Consolidated open systems –750GB – 3TB FTE –Well known dot-com 100TB FTE LAN based DAS –200GB – 500GB FTE –~25% of LAN administrator Tip

Policy-based, Exception Management Information life-cycle –Pre-define end-of-life –Manage performance hsm –Archive/delete Automate data integrity processing –Backups & Disaster Recovery –Build-in encryption standards –RAID may not be enough Best Practice

14 Use Technology to Manage Technology Networked storage –SAN & NAS support snapshot/remote copy –NDMP can use SAN hooks –SAN -> SAM –Virtualization SRM will become RSM –Real-time Storage Management –Application focused reporting –Automatic capacity provisioning Best Practice

Summary Storage is an enterprise resource There are no silver bullets Tools & technologies almost keep up Reinforce the business value of storage

Questions? Bob Zimmerman Director, Storage Research Giga Information Group