Storage Pipeline: State of the Art: Storage on Demand

Storage is just one of three main technology resources being virtualized into such pools via provisioning technology. But though requirements for the other two--computing power and network connectivity--are expected to increase or decrease dynamically based on workload, storage needs are likely to grow steadily, according to IT professionals. "Processing and network needs can go up and down 20 percent or 30 percent," says Paul Mercurio, senior vice president and CIO of Mobil Travel Guide in Park Ridge, Ill. "In storage, all we do is go up."

Mobil Travel Guide, a spin-off of ExxonMobil, worked with IBM Global Services to build a Linux infrastructure in an IBM mainframe that allows IT resources to be turned on and off, albeit with a delay of about a day, which Mercurio says he can live with. The company pays for its storage allocation on an as-needed basis, and its requirement is growing fast as services are added. "When we need more, we just call IBM and, boom, it's there," Mercurio says.

For some companies looking to provide on-demand storage to clients or staff, a storage infrastructure that uses provisioning technologies is proving to be a successful investment. BlueStar Solutions, a Cupertino, Calif., firm that outsources services based on applications such as J.D. Edwards, Oracle and SAP to customers on a charge-back basis, has found pooling storage resources among its clients the best way to manage those resources.

When a customer wants to run SAP in BlueStar's data center, for instance, BlueStar can take over the customer's equipment or lease space on its own equipment, which includes 1,200 production servers and 130 TB of storage, says Bill Augustadt, the service provider's CTO and chief architect. BlueStar pools and allocates these resources using technology from Veritas Software. This is the best solution for Veritas, Augustadt says, because, unlike hardware vendors that focus on their own platforms, BlueStar does not lock users into a single environment. "Veritas lives or dies on how it works in heterogeneous environments," he says.

In terms of zoning, which controls who can see what data on a storage-area network, and to a lesser extent, virtualization, which provides a single view of all the resources on a SAN, storage is the most developed on-

demand resource, Augustadt says. "We have two and a half people running 130 TB of storage on a 24x7 basis. We consider that normal. I laugh if someone says they need 10 people to run that much storage."

A more extreme example of how far on-demand storage has advanced comes from CGI, a Toronto IT service provider with a focus on customers in the life-sciences industry. Life sciences is an immature industry experiencing tenfold to twentyfold growth, says Perry Marshall, CGI vice president of marketing for government, health-care and emerging technologies. "We need to find a way to provide raw computing to such companies while letting them focus on their life-science work," he says. "One bioscience customer is less than five years old but already consuming more raw storage than the largest regional bank."

The challenge in such a situation is virtualizing sufficient storage for the increased demand that's inevitable when customers "start blasting apart and recombining genes," Marshall says. "You have to trust the parameters you build so that you know if X consumption happens, or it happens in a particular way, you know where it is saved, how it is saved, how it is decomposed and how it is brought back together."

Meanwhile, storage vendors are trying to simplify the storage-on-demand process. Most of the major storage hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM, have released--or at least announced--storage arrays shipping with capacity beyond immediate customer needs. In some cases the additional capacity can be activated immediately when the demand arises.

Still, the greatest strides to virtualize that capacity for simultaneous users are being made on the software side. Much of the virtualization technology offered by the major players comes from acquisitions of smaller companies. In September 2002, Sun Microsystems acquired Pirus Networks, which developed software to virtualize storage across heterogeneous systems, and in 2001 HP acquired StorageApps, on whose technology it now builds virtualization appliances. Veritas offers storage virtualization across heterogeneous hardware platforms thanks to its acquisition of several smaller companies that provide server virtualization and application-performance management.

On-demand storage is part of an overall utility computing offering from Computer Associates International, according to David Hochhauser, vice president of CA's Unicenter brand. "Most companies wanting to get started in utility computing do not want to roll in new equipment," Hochhauser says. "They want to see how to use their existing technology."

Of course, most hardware vendors dismiss any notion that a software-only approach is best. HP, which has offered server capacity on demand and pay for use since 1999, has extended that approach to storage and networking, according to Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing for the company's Enterprise Systems Group. With virtualization, resources can be moved where needed without rewiring, and that requires software tools and hardware features, including partitioning.

On-demand computing requires configuration and management, which is what IBM Global Services offers, according to Dev Mukherjee, IGS vice president of marketing and strategy for e-business on demand. By focusing on services, IGS is better able to help clients virtualize their infrastructure with a combination of IBM hardware and software technology, he says, adding that more than 50 percent of the technology in IGS data centers is non-IBM. "Customers want their IT or consulting partner to focus on helping make their business more efficient, not on how to become an expert on another piece of technology."

Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor at CRN specializing in storage and server coverage. Write to him at [email protected].