Does Your Storage Care About Your Business?
According to Computer Associates' Anders Lofgren and Jim Geronaitis,
the latest version of the BrightStor software suite makes storage
management more responsive to application-driven
performance requirements.
By Tom von Gunden
Computer Associates would, no doubt, love to see more public attention put back on the core of its business: its products. And, frankly, I'm happy to oblige. Over the past three to four years, while much media scrutiny has been placed on investigations into former financial reporting practices at CA, I have been watching the developments in CA's storage product offerings. In particular, I've followed with interest the expansion of BrightStor, CA's flagship line of SMS (storage management software) products. The BrightStor brand now spans a wide range of storage software applications — from backup (handled by ARCserve, CA's long-standing backup software product) through SAN (storage area network) design, management, and optimization and on to SRM (storage resource management). Given BrightStor's wide-ranging feature set, the fundamental question for CA, of course, is whether and when large numbers of end user companies will adopt overarching SMS (storage management software) suites. Traditionally, even large enterprises have tended to install storage management products (e.g. backup software) as point solutions: targeting one application, one department, or one platform at a time. CA believes its latest release can nudge suite adoption several steps forward.
The company recently announced BrightStor r11.1, a storage management software suite that continues the company's initiatives toward providing what it calls "intelligent storage management" and an "integrated enterprise view" of customers' storage environments. As I look back over the development of the BrightStor line, a couple of things stand out. First, I recall CA's acquisition of the product now known as BrightStor SAN Designer. I initially saw it in a demo version from the company that developed the product. What I've always liked about SAN Designer is that it offers a convenient, graphical way of mapping and testing all components in a networked storage environment. Once that environment is built, users need management tools, of course. So, another moment that stands out is my introduction to BrightStor Portal a few years ago. I was immediately intrigued by the possibility of a portal view that could, in essence, create a single administrative interface. That interface would provide access to all software tools an organization may have deployed — or may want to deploy — to manage its storage devices and the interconnections between them.
With BrightStor, CA intends to not only provide a single storage management interface but also to turn most storage management tasks over to policy-based automation engines. It's a grand goal, to be sure — one that CA shares with other software suite vendors and one that CA, admittedly, hasn't completely brought to fruition with version r11.1. Nevertheless, the company insists that the new release establishes the framework for getting there. I recently visited CA at its Islandia, NY headquarters, where I discussed the company's goals for its storage management offerings with BrightStor spokespersons Anders Lofgren, VP, product management, and Jim Geronaitis, VP, product marketing.
Tom: In the broadest sense, BrightStor r11.1 seems intended to support a central theme I repeatedly heard at CA World last May — that CA wants to be thought of as the "infrastructure management" company. Do you think customers looking for storage solutions currently think of CA in that regard?
Anders: Well, we're definitely working to change the perception of CA in the storage market. Traditionally, we've tended to be primarily thought of as a backup vendor. That's probably because we've had tremendous market traction with our ARCserve backup software products. But, we don't do only backup/recovery. We also do SRM, SAN management, SAN design, and so on. And, we've been doing those things for a number of years. With the BrightStor r11.1 release, we're simply increasing our focus on getting those things known and adopted.
Since you mention market adoption, I'm assuming you're seeing strong indicators that more end users may be willing to expand the types of storage management tools they use.
Anders: Absolutely. We admit that, when we looked at the market for SMS suites three or four years ago, our expectations — actually, the entire industry's expectations — were probably unrealistic. Companies were still trying to get a handle on backup and recovery. But, now most organizations have addressed their backup issues and are looking at other pain points. For example, they're looking at capacity utilization, which is usually poor. And, we know they're facing other challenges. They're trying to figure out how to do SRM, how to design their SANs, how to get more automation into their processes. Right now, those activities tend to be stovepipe operations. Over time, we'll see them become more fully integrated with each other. In fact, with the r11.1 release, we're moving BrightStor toward bringing all of the various storage management functions together on one management platform.
But, it's not there yet ...
Anders: Not completely, no. But, full integration and full automation is what we're driving toward. This is part of CA's overall goal of providing EIM, or enterprise infrastructure management, for its customers. A key part of EIM is bringing all management tools, including storage management tools, into an integrated, application-aware platform. Some of the products within BrightStor r11.1 already provide an integrated, application-aware view. For example, BrightStor Storage Resource Manager and BrightStor SAN Manager integrate to give you a spindle-level view of storage utilization and provisioning. Most SRM tools on the market give you a management view from the HBA [host bus adapter] down to the array controller. BrightStor r11.1 allows you to extend your management view even further. It offers a view from the application all the way down to the individual spindle, or physical drive, on a particular array. So, for example, if you're using Oracle, you can determine which data from Oracle sits on which spindle, and you can see every storage component in between the application and the array — all the connections, all the switches. Plus, r11.1 gives you performance measurements on all of it. Rather than just looking at the array, you're seeing everything in between.
What is the significance of being able to get an application-aware view of storage?
Anders: With basic SRM, you're looking at overall capacity utilization. But, that information is always incomplete because you're not seeing the path from the application all the way down to the device. What you need to know is not only how you're doing on utilization of your storage resources but also how well those resources are driving information to your applications and users.
Jim: Every storage device comes with a device manager, and several companies offer out-of-the-box SRM software. But, if you deploy a point solution to handle SRM, you might learn only about how well you're doing with performance on particular arrays. That kind of limited view forces a lot of organizations into being reactionary in terms of their storage management strategies. They deal with one problem, then they wait until another problem arises before addressing anything else. That's where a lot of customers still find themselves — sitting around, waiting for the next storage management crisis to present itself.
For example, if you're looking only at your capacity utilization, you won't know how the information relates back to the overall business. If all you know is that your utilization is stagnating at 65%, you might decide you need to buy more storage. But, if 40% of that 65% is for a project that was finished over a year ago, you may be able to migrate the offline and not buy more hardware for online disk storage. To align storage with your actual business, then, you need intelligent storage management. Understanding how information is used and moved is key to understanding how to manage a storage environment.
OK, so integrated storage management tools make it easier to get increasingly granular views into storage from an application-usage perspective. Are there other potential benefits end users should keep in mind?
Anders: Sure. When you have the ability to deploy fully integrated management tools, you can benefit from economies of scale. If you need to bring in new tools to manage a growing environment, you can leverage existing knowledge and skills among your IT staff and storage administrators. The process of training people can be streamlined because they're not learning a new interface each time a new feature or capability is added to the administrative mix. That's why CA is moving toward EIM, which relies on a common technology stack. That makes it easier for customers to manage their environments and easier for CA to develop new products.
But, whether or not organizations ever realize this grand view of EIM, where an entire IT infrastructure is managed on a common platform, they will have to deal with integrating management products from various vendors. Not everyone has bought or will buy CA products at every turn, and I'm assuming you wouldn't expect them to.
Anders: Oh, sure. We understand that. And, we will continue to sell our products as standalones. We know that customers may want to keep their existing non-CA backup product, for example. That's not necessarily a negative for us or for customers because the SRM tools in r11.1 report on other vendors' backup software. We already have the ability to report on IBM Tivoli, and we'll soon be able to do the same with Veritas and EMC/Legato.
Of course, we believe there is additional value for customers that link more of our products. Obviously, if you have only one CA product, you won't see the advantage as apparently as you would if you had more than one of our products. Because our user interface has the same look and feel across all of our products, the benefits of having integrated management tools will be greater if more of our products are in the environment.
Regardless of which vendors' products customers use for various aspects of storage management, many are likely to need to take a "walk before you run" approach, integrating a few tools at a time.
Anders: Yes, we realize that. In fact, we're helping customers by doing some of the integration right out of the box. In addition to the full BrightStor r11.1 enterprise license suite, we're offering two smaller suites of bundled modules. BrightStor Data Availability packages our backup products. BrightStor Storage Management bundles SAN Designer, SAN Manager, SRM, and Process Automation Manager.
Jim: Storage management is a good place for customers to establish a staged approach to having fully integrated tools for overall IT infrastructure management. Customers can start with SRM and find out what they have in their current storage environments: their hardware assets, their information assets, and their current policies and procedures for managing information. The next step is classifying the value of information and the storage infrastructure it's on and mapping that back to the business. Once the classifying stage is finished, customers can move to determining how they're going handle different kinds of data: what class of storage it's going to be placed on, what performance characteristics the storage must have, and so on.
So, if you really want to get to a fully integrated information management view, you need to get the foundation in place first, and that's your storage environment, the place where the information resides. Storage is the architecture that touches every business application.
Tom von Gunden is chief editor of Doc Management Online, Content Mgt Online, and IT Storage Online