Storage Resource Management as a Service (SRMaaS)

It is difficult to improve what you can’t measure. With organisations now managing complex storage environments of tens of terabytes, improved visibility is fundamental to improving operating efficiency and driving down spiralling storage costs. Storage Resource Management (SRM) can dramatically improve measurement and visibility.

Whilst these objections may have been valid 2-3 years ago, they do not necessarily hold true today. The relentless growth in data volumes and storage capacity means that the cost justification for storage reporting tools has changed:

• With many organisations now investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in storage hardware, relatively modest improvements in operating efficiency can deliver tens of thousands of pounds in cost savings;
• Multiple subsystems and devices, often from different vendors means that the time and skills required to manage these environments efficiently has increased;
• The cost of storage resource management (SRM) software is lower, particularly when delivered as-a-service, where the service provider’s volume discounts can be passed on the end user;

Collecting and analysing raw data from the storage environment can be difficult and time consuming. This results in storage administrators having poor visibility of the environment on a day to day basis which can result in:

• Capacity planning based on best estimates
• High safety margins for spare capacity of storage or ports
• Poor use of tiered storage with too much data residing on high cost disk
• Configuration errors resulting in poor performance or unexpected downtime

The latest SRM tools are lightweight, agentless, quick to deploy and focused on delivering key benefits for both mid-sized and large users.

SRM-as-a-Service from Tectrade

Tectrade in partnership with NetApp has developed a low-cost SRM service targeting the mid-market organisation. The service is focused on delivering measurable and sustainable cost savings and operating efficiency improvements with a compelling Return on Investment.

Tectrade’s approach to the ROI is to focus on key areas that deliver the largest, hard savings. Our aim is to justify a major part of the investment using these savings alone. However, there is also a range of soft benefits that we do not evaluate for the ROI that will, over time, deliver significant operating efficiencies and additional cost savings.

Why Use Tectrade’s SRMaaS?

SRMaaS has been developed as an entry–level SRM solution that delivers hard, measurable benefits. The advantage of an ‘as–a–service’ model is that the customer buys not just the software but also the services to deliver the promised benefits. The customer could, of course, simply purchase the underlying SRM software, however, Tectrade, in addition to delivering the SRM skills, benefit from volume licence agreements which means that we are usually able to provide SRMaaS at the same price or less.

The Software
The SRM software we use is from NetApp and, therefore, benefits from a global development team that only a large multi&national storage company can provide. The software is agentless and collects data from the various devices connected to the SAN fabric. Because there are no agents, the software is quick to deploy and non–disruptive. The software does not report at the file system level on individual LUN utilisation. In our experience many organisations already have tools that do this and, if required, we can provide these as part of the service.

The Service
The service element of SRMaaS is delivered by Tectrade’s ITIL–certified Ionix ServiceDesk and service delivery team. The service team comprises level 1, 2 and 3 support and represent skills developed over ten years of designing installing and supporting large, complex SAN environments. The majority of the services are delivered remotely via a secure link but we also include some on-site days to set up the software and to base-line the current environment.

Our basic service is designed to deliver the benefits of the SRM software but this can be upgraded to include various additional support options from Tectrade’s SANAssist suite.

Management Reports
SRMaaS includes a comprehensive range of management reports that can be tailored to individual requirements.

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Improved Capacity Utilisation
The effort required to compile utilisation information across a multivendor environment is a manual, time consuming and error prone exercise. Consequently organisations resort to inaccurate guesswork and expensive over provisioning as a way of dealing with uncertainty.

Poor visibility of the available storage capacity and a lack of accurate forecasting can result in unidentified spare capacity and excess spare capacity. Industry studies have shown that there is an average of 20-25% spare capacity in the average enterprise. With annual growth rates of 50% or more control of this headroom is an increasing challenge.

With Tectrade’s SRMaaS we are able to deliver a real–time, dash–board view across the entire environment including trending information. This visibility removes guesswork and estimates and we can consequently reduce the current spare capacity by as much as 40% and the introduction of ‘just-in-time’ purchasing.

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Tiering, Service Catalogue & Chargeback
Most organisations understand the benefits of matching the importance of data with the cost and performance of the disk on which it resides. An increasing number of organisations also recognise the benefits of creating a service catalogue which presents users with a set of attributes to help allocate the right profile of storage to the right application at the right price. By introducing chargeback alongside the service catalogue, users can be made more accountable for the storage assets they demand and consume.

SRMaas combines Tectrade’s experience of designing and implementing complex multi-tiered environments with traffic and connectivity data that enables us to identify hosts, currently using tier 1 disk that could, in future, use lower performance disk. We can help create a service catalogue for your organisation and the SRM software produces regular usage and chargeback reports.

Our experience suggests that 25% or more of current purchases of tier 1 disk could be redirected to lower cost, tier 2 disk without impacting performance. Many modern subsystems will allow a mix of disk under the same controller so operationally the introduction or extended use of tiering is relatively straight forward.

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Reclaimed Orphaned Storage
SRM tools can identify storage resources that are either orphaned or not receiving significant traffic and are candidates for reclamation. In a mid-sized or large environment this can amount to around 3% of the total capacity.

Tectrade will typically identify potential orphaned resources during a proof of concept or SAN Performance Study. SRM–as–a–Service will then perform periodic reviews to monitor traffic and connections to ports and LUNs to identify further candidates for reclamation.

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Improved Performance Utilisation
We include performance utilisation as a soft saving but for organisations with multiple disk arrays this aspect of SRMaaS can be a significant benefit. SRMaaS provides clear visibility of ‘hot’ arrays, disks and volumes in the context of affected hosts and applications. More efficient load balancing can help postpone capital expenditure by increasing utilisation across the storage estate.

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