Raising the standard

Vincent Franceschini of SNIA tells FST about the state of the storage network industry and the role that standards have to play in effective information management.

As operational and regulatory considerations compel organisations to store more and more information, data centres are growing ever larger and more complex. In his role as Chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association, Vincent Franceschini is only too aware of the challenges this presents: “More information means more storage resources to be managed,” he says. “There are resources for highly available services and applications, resources for less important pools of information, archiving, disaster recovery and so on. There are many different angles from which you can approach data growth.”

There has recently been an increased focus on what can be done to effectively marshal these huge stores of information. Not all data repositories are created equal: there are variations in format, importance, security and so on. The challenge comes in working out how to access all these different types of data in a reliable and accurate manner. There are also issues around what’s been termed information lifecycle management. “What do you do to align your infrastructure, not just your storage network infrastructure but your whole data centre?” asks Franceschini. “How do you align your infrastructure with your evolving business environment and how do you coordinate your infrastructure with your business priorities?”

These are the questions that SNIA has been addressing since its inception. “With the help of our data management forum we have looked at all sorts of different disciplines associated with resource management,” says Franceschini. “This includes areas like long term archiving, continuous data protection, storage tiering and handling virtualised resources.” Each is integral to the successful management of these growing reserves of data, but not all organisations are at the same level when it comes to understanding the implications for their own business environment.

“The reality of the market is that there is a big disparity between different industry sectors and users about how much knowledge and expertise they have on this,” says Franceschini. “Some users have already implemented their own methods and are already dealing with their IT suppliers to align software and infrastructure. Others are starting from scratch.”

SNIA’s aim is to leverage the recent successes of specific sectors and generalise them as best practice. This will then provide tools the whole industry can use to implement effective storage solutions. “The storage industry is growing up and evolving more into a role of supporting information management,” explains Franceschini. “So we have to go higher and higher in the stack to complement existing information management systems. Then whatever is done at the higher layers in line with wider business objectives can become easily actionable throughout the infrastructure.”

Asked about tangible ways in which the storage industry is changing, Franceschini points to one major trend. “The time of the huge monolithic software package has passed,” he says. “If you look at all the major business solution and software suppliers, they are looking at a much more modular approach so that services and functions associated with the management of business processes can be easily distributed to any corner of the IT infrastructure.” This means that information and resources have to follow this modularisation of applications, allowing supply of the right data sets to the right places at the right time. This is very different from having a centralised approach to data management and it can present problems: “We have potentially become a lot more distributed,” Franceschini says. “But we still have to maintain the same levels of quality, security, integrity and consistency that were previously required.”

Virtual reality
Another major shift in the industry can be seen in the drive towards virtualisation. “The idea is that we need to rationalise our environment and be able to do more with less,” explains Franceschini. “We want to get the best ROI on our assets, so therefore if we see a resource doing nothing in our environment then we’re not getting the best return.” This idea can be applied at server level, application level, network level and storage level. The challenge comes in coordinating all these levels in a coherent and user-friendly fashion. Franceschini continues: “If you talk to any CIO, CXO or even CFO they will say: ‘Please rationalise this for me, please help me make sense of this technology.’”

Achieving the level of cross-enterprise virtualisation currently being demanded by business first requires a high standard of integration. Franceschini elaborates: “We need to put the right tools and the right standards in place so that integration becomes possible and virtualisation solutions can be applied in the storage space for the servers, and from the servers to application level.” Reaching this plateau of integration is no easy task and certainly not one that SNIA can accomplish on its own. “We have an alliance network in place so that we can partner with different industry groups when required,” says Franceschini. “We can not only position what the storage industry can do but also be in sync with the trends at the forefront of some of the developments.”

Given the sheer volume of business-critical information now stored in the average data centre, the implications of even a small outage are potentially massive. Recent high-profile events like Hurricane Katrina have thrown the issue of disaster recovery into sharp relief. Franceschini concurs: “I think that right now there is a great focus on what needs to be done to have a disaster recovery policy that makes sense for business.” Where previously, management may have neglected disaster planning, they are at least now attempting to grapple with the problem. But the process is not a simple one. In Europe, where moving information from one country to another may be required, companies may need to be aware of the legal and financial implications of data crossing international boundaries. Furthermore, even companies that have previously had some sort of contingency planning in place can sometimes stumble in the event of a real crisis. “Very often disaster recovery plans were implemented but there was very little testing done,” says Franceschini. “So when it was time to use these mechanisms enterprises faced problems because they found themselves managing scenarios that they had not gone through before.”

But companies are presented with plenty of networking choice when it comes to their emergency planning, as Franceschini explains: “Whether it be LAN, WAN or MAN based there’s been a lot of different solutions implemented.” The emergence of IP based storage networks has led to them being a gradually increasing part of recovery infrastructure. Franceschini goes on: “IP is seen as a good solution to cope with distances at a reasonable price level. So there are different ways and it is now part of the technology landscape that’s available to users.” Nonetheless, one needs to bear in mind that more traditional fibre channel and multiplexing technology still form the basis of many disaster recovery solutions.

Working together
Interoperability is currently something of a buzzword in the industry, a ‘Holy Grail’ objective that everyone is pursuing. But Franceschini makes it clear it is not a concept that can be easily defined. “The notion of interoperability means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” he says. “For some IT professionals it will mean the ease of deployment, for others it would be plug and play, for others it would be supportability. There are many shades of grey.” While not every user will have exactly the same expectations, the overriding value of interoperability comes in allowing new technologies to be integrated with minimal disruption to business. Franceschini sees the implementation of certified standards as a valuable tool in winning this battle. “While they alone are not sufficient to ensure interoperability, standards are a very important component,” he explains. “With certified standards you can demonstrate that your product, whether it is a client system or a provider system, will perform to a certain level.”

But as helpful as standards can be, Franceschini tempers his optimism with a healthy dose of realism: “I don’t believe that you will see anybody in the industry coming forward to say that they can guarantee 100 percent interoperability,” he explains. “That doesn’t exist, even with well known technologies like Ethernet which has 30 odd years of development.”

There are also inherent risks in this consuming drive towards interoperability, as the SNIA Chairman makes clear: “We have to be careful that we don’t kill innovation by making things interoperable from day one,” he says “It always takes time for technology and the marketplace to mature.” This maturing process is something that has been happening in the storage industry over the last decade, allowing it to reach the fairly strong position it is in today. Says Franceschini: “Back in 1995 when I was talking about the first fibre channel networks, there were clear interoperability issues. Hubs or switches from vendor A would not work well with products from vendor B. That was a basic interoperability issue, but I think we passed that stage quite some time ago.” Nowadays interoperability challenges are focused on the integration of sophisticated management functions such as improved security or data protection.

Franceschini is forthright on the importance of education for effective storage networking: “It’s been central for SNIA from day one,” he says. “ We realised that we were moving into a different technology space. We therefore had to educate everybody, from the people developing solutions to the people deploying and using them.” SNIA now operates a wide range of educational programmes including vendor-neutral tutorials that help IT professionals understand the key issues of data management and storage networks. Key among these is the IT Professional Certification Programme. It aims to provide an industry-wide benchmark of what a storage professional actually is. “There are now about 2500 people who have gone through the SNIA certification process and we want to see more,” continues Franceschini. Alongside SNIA’s activities, vendors are also operating training activities for their customers and partners. Many of these vendors are working closely with the SNIA and using its training and certification programmes as the basis for their own educational efforts. Franceschini: “There is a definite common ground across the industry in helping to build the reference and knowledge base that we need to move forward.”

Standard issue
In conversation with Franceschini it is clear that he sees a lack of agreed standards as one of the major obstacles to ensuring effective, industry-wide storage network practices. Unsurprisingly, SNIA has been active in trying to remedy this. The Association experienced a significant success when its Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S) was adopted as an International Standard by ISO and IEC in early 2007. “The SNIA has been prompt in developing its international presence,” explains Franceschini. “Besides Europe and the US we have footholds in Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. So we’re covering all the major storage business territories.” Thanks to its presence in so many markets, SNIA has been uniquely placed to recognise the global need for a unified standard. “When we opened in China, it became clear that we had to go beyond the current ANSI standards,” he continues. “As the industry was growing into new territories such as the booming China economy we thought that it was clearly appropriate for us to move in this direction.”

Though it is still too early to really see the impact on ISO’s adoption of SMI-S, Franceschini is optimistic that the long-term effects could be significant: “Now that SMI-S has been adopted by ISO as a standard it means that it can be quoted in all official documents of management standards that require ISO certification.” Given that ISO certification is a requirement for many major public and private companies across the world, the potential for wider acceptance is considerable. Perhaps even more importantly, ISO is recognised by a many governments and government agencies. This should extend SMI-S’s reach even further. Franceschini elaborates: “For example, the European Commission only recognises three different standardisation sources, one of them being ISO. So if the EC decides to run a project that has some connection with storage resource management for large infrastructures then SMI-S can be referenced.”

Due to the ever-shifting technological landscape of the storage network industry, it seems highly unlikely that a position where every issue will be fully resolved will ever be reached. But as long as organisations like SNIA continue to work with vendors and users to develop workable solutions, things should keep moving in the right direction. Outlining SNIA’s future plans, Franceschini expresses the desire to expand the association’s remit: “We want to continue doing what we have done so far, but we also want to address the requirements of different end user layers,” he says. “Managing information for healthcare doesn’t equal managing information for banking or insurance. We want to be more focused on supporting information management through standards based best practices and educational tools to be ready to push the industry forward.”