One of the reasons that storage is so expensive to manage in the enterprise is it requires a dedicated administrator and each different type of storage system typically requires a specialist to manage. That level of complexity makes storage increasingly cost-prohibitive to manage as the number and size of all the data types continue to increase exponentially.
To help IT organizations start to address this challenge, iWave Software today released an upgrade to its cross-platform storage automation software that now includes support for block-level storage systems in addition to file servers.
According to Ron Smith, vice president of sales and marketing at iWave Software, IT organizations are increasingly looking to automate storage management functions across multiple platforms. Not only do they want to reduce their reliance on manual storage processes, but they are looking to unify the management of storage systems in a way that allows them to contain, if not reduce, the number of dedicated storage administrators they require.
In addition, iWave is announcing that it is exposing its software to other management consoles via RESTful APIs, which means that IT organizations can now invoke version 6.5 of iWave Storage Automator via another system management platform. In effect, that makes it easier for IT generalists to manage storage as part of the overall data center.
While there will still be a need for storage architects to define and set policies, iWave Storage Automator, says Smith, is specifically designed to give storage architects more control over how those policies get executed. In today’s data center environments, manual storage processes often lead to “policy drift” as each administrator manually configures and allocates storage. In addition, those manual processes are much more likely to be subject to human error, says Smith.
Finally, in the age of the cloud, IT organizations are looking for ways to dynamically provision storage in a matter of minutes, versus being able to provision a virtual machine in seconds while waiting weeks for the associated amount of storage that goes with that virtual machine to be allocated.
The challenge, unfortunately, is that IT organizations are struggling to manage a more diverse range of systems from multiple vendors. What’s needed is a more holistic approach to managing storage infrastructure that serves to minimize management costs at a time when a deluge of Big Data is threatening to overwhelm the data center.
