Xiotech Emprise 7000

The rule of thumb for staffing storage administrators today pegs 25TB as the nominal amount of storage that a single administrator can handle. More importantly, a full-featured 25TB SAN array costs less than $50,000. That means operating expense (OpEx) outlay will be greater than capital expense (CapEx) outlay in the first year. It also explains why senior IT executives rank IT Service Management (ITSM) as strategic as the virtualization of an operating environment.

Traditionally, IT has tried to improve productivity by acquiring software tools designed to resolve ad hoc resource problems. That "better firefighting" approach was doomed to failure from inception. Studies consistently cite changes in the computing environment introduced by IT as the cause of 80 percent of all computing disruptions. Given that statistic, ITSM relies on a classic quality control solution to process management-a scheme favored by CEOs-to automate standard IT administrator tasks.

Software typically used by IT, however, greatly complicates any application of process management or an attempt to establish a Virtual Operating Environment (VOE). IT tools are all but universally device-centric, while virtualization is about generic devices and process management is about work flows across devices. For IT, the mandate is to move operations out of its device-centric ghetto.

The Xiotech Emprise 7000 SAN storage system fits perfectly into the VOE and ITSM construct through its unique management framework that employs standard Web Services protocols to automate storage-related tasks not just across multiple storage systems, but also across operating systems, and Virtual Operating Environments (VOEs). Utilizing protocols such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL, Emprise 7000 management software, dubbed ICON Manager, leverages Web Services support built into Windows Server, Linux, and VMware ESX Server.

The impact of ICON Manager on system and storage management through the use of Web Services is quite prodigious as ICON Manager shatters previous notions of single-pane-of-glass management. Within IT, the notion of single-pane-of-glass management has become associated with software that allows a single class of devices, such as storage arrays, to be virtualized and managed as a single logical device. ICON Manager radically departs from the notion of just managing a class of devices to managing all of the devices involved in a storage function.

The extent to which this approach slashes OpEx costs associated with system and storage management can best be seen in the provisioning of storage devices for virtual machines (VMs). The use of VMs in a VOE, such as VMware, greatly benefits IT's bottom line with respect to improved resource utilization. Nonetheless, there is also an added inherent complexity for IT administrators, who must learn to deal with the layers of indirection in a VOE.

Using any storage array without the ICON Manager framework, IT administrators must invoke three distinct and disjointed views of the storage environment to complete the task of provisioning storage for a VM: the view of the storage array's GUI; the view of either the ESX Server or vCenter Server (formally VirtualCenter) via the VMware Infrastructure Client; and finally the view of the VM's native OS management GUI. In sharp contrast, ICON Manager is able to provide a single global view for the storage provisioning process via the interoperability derived through Web Services. That integrated function-centric approach dramatically reduces the steps, time, and expertise required to provision a VM.