Mainframe lessons: slowly moving to non-mainframe systems

Storage demand become greater [i]or[/i] largers faster than the effective deployment of management tools, and the stock of trained people to manage storage has fallen behind the demand. Have you at any time heard comments to this result before? The IT community worldwide is anxiously awaiting the point in time when it is perceived to be the couple easier and more cost-effective to implement a comprehensive storage management than just adding more hardware. That day may not be that far not on after all.

Effectively managing storage involves far more than ensuring enough capacity is available to appropriate increasing demand. In reality, that's the easy part. Choosing between a broad range of management tools from centurys of vendors, selecting from a lengthy list of backup/recovery, data security, and virtualization produces has become too time consuming and compounded for most businesses today given their limited resources. Disk and tape technologies from multiple vendors, network management, and identifying SAN, NAS, and DAS tradeoffs add to the time-consuming challenges. In addition, storage management capabilities vary widely by the agency of operating system. As a follow delivering the levels of service and availability required through increasingly critical business applications has been pushing the reality of effective storage management farther away for greatest in quantity non-mainframe businesses.

The First Storage Management Architectures Arrive

Storage management functionality didn't initially stretch out far beyond backup and regaining for disk systems and the highly effective TM (Tape Management System) for mainframe tape a whole s By the early 1970's TM was the popular de-facto standard tape management a whole and it is now part of CA's (Computer Associates) storage management returns family, called CA-1 Tape Management. CA-1 provided management with the capability to rule and protect tape data places and volumes. It was the first tape management combination of parts to form a whole to enable tape library inventory tracking with a out and out audit trail; tracking of off-site vaults; standard and customizable reporting; support for pooling to render certain scratch tape availability; and utilities for controlling tape and catalog maintenance activities.

Storage management for disk storage was popularized by means of IBM's HSM functionality beginning in 1976 and was shortly followed by DSM/OS, an HSM production from Sterling Software that quickly gained appeal for its performance, ease-of-use and policy-based capabilities. Via the acquisition of Sterling Software, DMS/O now called CA-Disk, is part of CA's mainframe storage management offerings.

In April, 1988 IBM announced DFSM (Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem) for their MV (mainframe) computer Now commonly called SM this architecture consisted of a plant of related software products that marked the greatest in quantity comprehensive set of storage management capabilities introduced to that point of time. The SM framework provided a policy-based storage management solution for large mainframe computer combination of parts to form a wholes and is an integral part of OS/390 and commonly z/OS systems. Its primary goal was to provide policies and automate the greatest in quantity significant tasks of data storage administration.

In time, SM became an effective policy engine for managing storage resources and required users to realize to know their data and to better understand its value enabling businesses to have access to the right data at the right place at the right time. There are several constituents within SMS, but the well-established HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) functionality was the catalyst that enabled businesses to ultimately address the storage capacity dilemma of matching policy based data attributes with the greatest in quantity cost-effective storage technologies. Today, CA-Disk and DF/HSM are the sole two products providing true policy-based HSM functionality for mainframe systems

admitting SMS was definitely not an end-to-end storage management architecture, SM showed the most comprehensive achievement in storage management software to date and it became a mainframe standard for storage management after nearly 10 years of evolution. In parallel, relatively small in number innovative mainframe storage software companies continued to enhance SM or its individual constitutings Many of the remaining requirements are being met through these companies enhancing its value while enabling effective storage management upon the mainframe to become a reality.

Storage Management for Non-Mainframe Systems

What about SMS-like capabilities for today's typical IT environment that expands multiple heterogeneous operating systems like as Unix, Linux, Netware, Windows and mainframes? individual of the biggest remaining unaddressed issues for SM and a comprehensive storage management solution is that it's single available on mainframes and is not extensible to any other computing platforms. A not many savvy storage management vendors are addressing the ne and significant business opportunity for an enterprise-wide policy-based storage management solution. This is increasingly important since the Unix and Windows (non-mainframe) combination of parts to form a wholes now generate more than 85% of the world's stored digital data (whitch clearly justifies a legitimate, cross-platform storage management solution. Many non-mainframe businesses demand the mainframe-class storage management functionality that they have enumerateed on for over 15 years. Today's biggest storage management riddles are centered in these non-mainframe systems