LEARN MORE ON BASEIC REQUIREMENTS OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

LEARN MORE ON BASEIC REQUIREMENTS OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The management of storage networks is of different significance to various technical fields For example, the classical network administrator is interested in the question of how the data should be transported and how it is possible to ensure that the transport functions correctly. Further aspects for him are the transmission capacity of the transport medium, redundancy of the data paths or the support for and operation of numerous protocols (Fibre Channel FCP, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, etc.). In short: to a network administrator it is important how the data travels from A to B and not what happens to it when it finally arrives at its destination. This is where the field of interest of a storage administrator begins. He is more interested

in the organization and storage of the data when it has arrived at its destination. He is concerned with the allocation of LUNs to the servers (LUN mapping) of intelligent storage systems or the RAID levels used. A storage administrator therefore assumes that the data has already arrived intact at point B and concerns himself with aspects of storage. The data transport in itself has no importance to him. An industrial economist, on the other hand, assumes that A, B and the route between them function correctly and concerns himself with the question of how long it takes for the individual devices to depreciate or when an investment in new hardware and software must be made. Abalancedmanagement systemmust ultimately live up to all these different requirements equally. It should cover the complete bandwidth from the start of the conceptual phase through the implementation of the storage network to its daily operation. Therefore, right from the conception of the storage network, appropriate measures should be put in place to subsequently make management easier in daily operation. A good way of taking into account all aspects of such a management system for

a storage network is to orientate ourselves with the requirements that the individual components of the storage network will impose upon a management system. These components include:

• Applications These include all software that processes data in a storage network.

• Data Data is the term used for all information that is processed by the applications, transported over the network and stored on storage resources.

• Resources The resources include all the hardware that is required for the storage and the transportf the data and the operation of applications.

• Network The term network is used to mean the connections between the individual resources. Diverse requirements can now be formulated for these individual components with regard to monitoring, availability, performance or scalability. Some of these are requirements such as monitoring that occur during the daily operation of a storage network, others are requirements such as availability that must be taken into account as early as

the implementation phase of a storage network. For reasons of readability we do not want to investigate the individual requirements in more detail at this point. In Appendix

B you will find a detailed elaboration of these requirements in the form of a checklist. We now wish to turn our attention to the possibilities that a management system can offer in daily operation.