Xiotech Emprise 7000

By Jack Fegreus
published: Tuesday, March 10 2009

Iconic Migration

Via Web Services, Xiotech moves storage administration out of its device-centric ghetto and into the world of Virtual Operating Environments.

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.

Xiotech takes that integration one step further by providing a Web Services SDK. Applications drive the utilization of storage and that makes applications and the servers on which those applications run essential members of any end-to-end storage-provisioning process. With the Xiotech SDK, software development teams at user sites have the tools needed to integrate software applications with the Emprise 7000 storage system to automate repetitive or complex tasks. With the Web Services SDK, business applications can be extended to become self-provisioning, which reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an Emprise 7000 system even more dramatically.

Xiotech's ICON Manager offers IT a simple process-oriented solution to begin optimizing storage as a service. The critical differentiator for ICON Manager is the use of Web Services to communicate with storage systems and servers. With Web Services providing a transparent integration mechanism to link the Emprise 7000 with standard Windows and Linux operating systems along with VMware ESX Servers and vCenter Server, ICON Manager presents IT administrators with an extensive set of views that cluster around the different roles and information needs of system and storage managers.

For system and storage managers, the ICON Manager views are a powerful alternative to invoking separate management applications for each device class involved in a storage management process. By eliminating the need to work with both array and server consoles when performing complex or repetitive process tasks, such as provisioning logical volumes or virtualizing volume ownership, ICON Manager reduces the probability that an IT administrator will introduce errors. As a result, IT is able to more rigorously assert control over storage management processes and thereby significantly reduce TCO for storage resources.

What's more, the Web Services scheme is agentless. While there is tight integration across all devices involved in storage processes, storage systems and servers remain entirely independent. There are no dependencies for IT administrators to track or worry about when performing upgrades or doing maintenance on any of these resources.