February 23, 2021 / Norman St. Pierre / No Comments
Simplifying storage provisioning is a critical capability to look for in your next storage solution. While provisioning a single volume one time during an evaluation may seem easy, performing this task over and over again becomes tedious, time consuming and introduces the potential for errors.
For storage administrators or anyone that has storage administration in their job function, provisioning storage is just one of many elements of managing the overall IT environment. This sounds very basic and easy. Unfortunately, simply carving out a volume (LUN) for an application host or a new share for a specific application or for users to share files, can have far-reaching implications for the storage system’s health, performance, and compliance with data management policies for an organization.
Storage Provisioning, a Not So Simple, Simple Task
Handling the complexities around protection and application performance assurance to meet a particular Service Level Agreement (SLA) within the organization can become complex. What level of RAID do you choose? Do you have the option to change the performance characteristics from the storage provider? Are you using a “One-Size-Fits-All” mentality and simply buying the most expensive storage platform you can and then just accepting what you get from them? As we have all come to realize, different storage characteristics, like RAID protection levels, can have significant implications for application I/O and performance. Now you must balance this out for the hundreds, if not thousands of volumes you provision and manage. This can be a daunting task for anyone.
On top of ensuring an SLA for performance, you also must address the data compliance elements which apply to the newly created service. What should the data protection aspects of the service be? Should you take snapshots every hour, day, week, or month? How long do you retain snapshots? Should all application volumes have the same snapshot settings? Is all data created treated with the same level of business importance? Now consider the hundreds or thousands of volumes and shares that an organization typically manages. The provisioning process gets complicated very quickly, and simplifying storage provisioning becomes a must have requirement.And then, there is the element of time to provision data services. If you do this specific task for a specific application, it is easy to remember what you have done. You can also make the same selections around configuration and protection for that data service. Of course, this simply means stringing together the many steps needed to pull this off. In some cases, there are over 20 steps to properly provision and protect the data service being provisioned. You may have the steps memorized, but what do you have to do when you must provision an application data service that you haven’t done in a while? You either must have a well-documented plan or you must investigate what you have done in the past and try to recreate the same steps. Consistent provisioning within a workload type is essential so that you can ensure the newly created data service meets the same criteria it had before. In both scenarios, a lot of extra time is wasted executing this seemingly simple task.Storage Provisioning in the Real World
Here is what I have observed in many organizations. Most storage admins use snapshots sparingly because they are complicated to set up, manage, and use. Hardly anyone has the time to document a data services provisioning plan. The fact that it is even mentioned here should give you some pause on the complexities of managing your current storage platform. People that manage IT environments usually have many tasks within their day-to-day functions. Trying to remember a series of complex steps or even take the time to document them is not practical.
Storage Provisioning for the Modern Data Center
StorONE offers the solution for handling these complexities and turning them into simple tasks. Application Templates remove the time-consuming multitude of steps down to 4 clicks, even for the most complex multi-volume and multi-protection scheme possibilities. An application template can be configured to handle multiple volumes, each with different characteristics in terms of performance and protection. StorONE application templates ensure the data compliance elements are met. They also remove the potential for error when the admin must try to remember what was done the last time this task was executed.
In the case of a database application (virtualized or bare-metal), admins usually create multiple volumes. The number of volumes associated with that database depends on many different factors. For example, you may have a volume for boot and binaries, a database volume, a log volume, an index volume, and an archive log volume. Each of these volumes would have different characteristics in terms of performance and protection (RAID settings and snapshot intervals). The database configurations for an On-Line Transaction Processing application, or Data Warehouse use-case, each have different characteristics and sizes.
With StorONE Application Templates, you can easily define not only the number of volumes, but the size, performance, and protection characteristics of each. Once the application template is set up, gone are the time-consuming, error-prone tasks associated with repetitive, complex data services provisioning. With application templates, you can be assured that each newly created data service volume meets all the requirements for size, performance, and data compliance for any application within your environment.
StorONE Delivers Results
Our tagline is StorONE Thinks Results. Application templates are one small example of that focus and the storage admin is the beneficiary. Because the storage admin is able to create these templates, they will fit perfectly within each organization’s unique compliance, workflow and business or application specific requirements as defined by the business and not the vendor. It also makes it worth the investment in time, spending a few extra minutes to ensure that volumes are configured perfectly, since that investment will pay off with each execution.
StorONE is delivering better tools for storage administrators to helps them reduce complexities, save time, and make at least some of their daily tasks easier to manage.
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