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“We believe that today information is the most important asset for an organisation.” Roudy Eid, UAE presales team leader, EMC Middle East

While the latest in technologies offer regional enterprises wide choices in storage systems and connectivity options, the underlying problem of considering information management in silos remains, and might continue to do so for sometime. Sathya Mithra Ashok investigates.

Storage of enterprise data is no longer a simple case of saving the said data, in its modern form, it is the more critical task of information management.

“We believe that today information is the most important asset for an organisation and losing this information can cause a lot of organisations to go out of business. This is why we believe that storage is no longer just an add-on to networks. It is something that complements existing infrastructure in a data centre,” says Roudy Eid, UAE presales team leader at EMC Middle East.

Many of the bigger storage vendors in the region believe that their larger customers are well on their way to adopting the mindset necessary to view storage as a crucial IT investment instead of as just another hardware buy.

However, whether an organisation possesses the right mindset or not, the increasing number of storage options available in the market continue to make investment, integration and management of storage a relatively complex, if not difficult, task for most enterprises.

Integrate with ease

If you were to believe vendors, integrating storage into a functioning network is a relatively easy task for the majority of today’s enterprises to achieve.

“It is not really difficult to integrate storage. The thing is that if you look at storage infrastructure, as long as we have a way to connect to an existing network, whether Fibre Channel or iSCSI or IP protocol, it is not difficult,” says Walid Gomaa, StorageWorks business unit manager at HP Middle East.

Eid agrees: “Adding any storage infrastructure to a consolidated network is a straight forward process today. If you look at storage systems they do have multiple options from a connectivity perspective and they do offer connectivity to Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Ethernet and very soon, there will be more of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). So perfectly integrating storage systems with an enterprise network is no longer a very complex task.”

The difficult job in creating any storage environment, according to them, is the planning that has to precede it.

“When you connect storage systems and apps into a network, the first thing we need to understand is the current network infrastructure. There are different ways of connecting storage to existing apps and network infrastructure. This means the methodology varies depending on whether it is a Fibre Channel, iSCSI or IP network. Enterprises need to also consider the application they are running, the availability they will require on it and the current availability of the network. If there is a lack of proper availability, they will need to create a network for the application,” says Gomaa.

In other words, enterprises will need to plan storage and integrate environments based on the applications they are running, the performance levels they need for each of these and the service levels that are acceptable to them.

Anthony Harrison, server and storage management expert, Symantec MENA explains it thus: “There are a range of ways to do storage integration, depending on what you have and what you need. If you are just starting off and all you have today is direct-attached storage, then the quickest and easiest way to add capacity is using something like network-attached storage. As the size of your environment and the number of applications grow, the justification for a dedicated SAN increases, typically using Fibre Channel connectivity. Thirdly, if you are running critical applications in a cluster environment where multiple servers need access to the same storage, you need a configuration that eliminates single points of failure, so this requires a full SAN fabric with multiple host bus adapters per server, at least two SAN switches and multiple connections per storage array.”

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