Getting Social

Interop debuted its Community Hub among the socially savvy located in the Expo Hall. Aimed at social media types, even the novice tweeter found a ton of valuable info in sessions titled “Building a Global Support Network Using Social Media” and, my favorite, InformationWeek’s “So You Want To Be a Social Influencer.” They even had a space where a video crew could capture your Interop experience. I’ve seen some of those elements used at Cisco Live, but it was nice seeing a tradeshow address the social media needs of its exhibitors and attendees beyond just creating a show #hashtag.

The Main Attraction

Cisco Systems CTO Padmasree Warrior is the main attraction wherever she speaks. Well, except at Cisco Live when her colleagues schedule her opposite William Shatner, John Cleese, and the MythBusters. Sorry, Padma. But at Interop she was the feature presentation. Even with Avaya’s Marc Randall and VMware’s Steve Herrod on the keynote schedule, Padmasree’s only true competition was the cast of Dreamworks Animation’s Madagascar 3. More about that later. What I love best about Padmasree’s keynotes are her slides. Her “Cisco Cloud Strategy” slide in particular offered up how Cisco tailors solutions for building clouds, connecting users to the cloud, and assisting customers with deploying cloud services. Her “Evolution of the Network” slide showed how our networks of tomorrow will have to be prepared for unified workspaces, knowledge clouds, and immersive applications. Another slide detailed how in 2010 there were about two connected devices per person. By 2020, that number will skyrocket to 50 billion total or 6.58 devices per human. I’m gonna have to invest in a pair of cargo pants for sure.

The Silver Lining

Looking over the Interop schedule before the conference, the cloud keynote panel didn’t get my attention. It was stuck between the keynote by VMware CTO Steve Herrod on the software-defined data center and the aforementioned Dreamworks preview. So who could blame me for missing it, right? So as I waited for the Dreamworks show to start, Ellen Rubin took the stage. She’s the VP of Cloud Products for Terremark and is a very compelling speaker. “The hybrid cloud is here to stay because customers want to manage applications in both private and public cloud infrastructures,” she said. My ears perked up. When Rackspace CTO John Engates piped in, as did Steve Shalita of NetScout Systems, I was glad I had stumbled upon the discussion. We could all learn a bit more about the ever-changing cloud landscape. According to the cloud panel, transporting data between numerous cloud providers is a concern for businesses transitioning their IT infrastructures. Moving essential applications to the cloud is a bigger one.

Cloud Computing Gets Animated

HP’s collaboration presentation with Dreamworks Animation SKG was impressive. While a lot of cloud discussions focus on solving the problems of scale and virtualization in the data center, HP shed light on cloud computing as a service and connecting users, like say digital artists across the globe, with needed applications. Dreamworks, the filmmakers behind the Shrek franchise, Kung Fu Panda, and Chicken Run, previewed two 3D clips of the upcoming summer blockbuster Madagascar 3 during the keynote. Just imagine a room full of hundreds of tech geeks in 3D glasses watching a cartoon. It looked great on Mandalay Bay’s theater-quality screens. With the help of HP’s cloud and networking technology, Dreamworks can now produce five feature films every two years. Using HP’s SwitchCloud to store and distribute files, Dreamworks has reduced its dependency on local storage and reduced bandwidth issues. With studios in California and Bangalore, India, Dreamworks digital artists can now work on any project, no matter their location. But it’s not easy. Each film has a ton of data associated with it. Making that data accessible at all times has been easier with HP’s help.

He’s Got Game

I love playing Words with Friends by Zynga on Facebook, even on a plane. So when I saw that Zynga’s CTO Allan Leinwand was speaking, I made sure to add that to my Interop to-do list. Despite overly cute slides in Farmville style, Leinwand discussed Zynga’s transformation from a traditional IT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud solution Zynga calls zCloud. With the addition of data centers on both US coasts, Zynga gamers went from playing 80% on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud to 20%. Leinwand explained that Zynga’s decision to go to a hybrid cloud model was simple: more control. Now if I could just find someone to milk my cow in Farmville when I’m on the road.

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Cloud computing is a new business model powered by new technologies. It’s an on-demand, self-service, “pay as you go” model for access to hosting infrastructure (networks, servers, storage, operating systems, applications, support, administration). Cloud providers deliver infrastructure, platforms and applications as a service.

With Cloud Computing the business pays only for what it uses. Compared to traditional models, Cloud can deliver five– to ten-fold improvements in costs and time to market (although 20% is more realistic). Pay-as-you-go eliminates over– and under-provisioning capacity. Over-provisioning wastes money. It also reduces funds available– for other investments. Under-provisioning increases time to value and can result in lost revenue as customer experience degrades. Automated capacity management is built into the Cloud. Adding or removing infrastructure quickly in response to demand offers agility and cost effectiveness traditional IT cannot match. A Cloud has five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. Each has its pros and cons. Cloud can reduce the time, money, and the number of people it takes to build and deploy applications and related hosting infrastructure. Yet Cloud is not always the right solution.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Five key feature characteristics define the Cloud.

1. On-demand self-service to infrastructure, platforms and applications delivered by a “pay-as-you-go” model based on usage.
2. Broad access through mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations.
3. Resource pooling and automation to combine resources into managed services.
4. Rapid elasticity that scales automatically and quickly with demand.
5. Measured service with usage monitored, controlled, and reported.

 Three Cloud service models define decreasing levels of control.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides network, server, storage, and middleware that IT uses to deploy and run their own operating systems and applications. IT has control only over operating systems and applications. IT can configure storage and some network configurations. IaaS is used to create platforms for service and application development, test, and deployment.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides application hosting and development tools. Developers create and deploy their applications into Cloud infrastructures. Developers control only their applications and some operating system configurations. PaaS is used to create and deploy applications and services for users.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) provides pre-built applications, typically available via web browser. Consumers control only application configuration settings. SaaS is used to complete business tasks.

 Four Cloud deployment models describe Cloud ownership and usage.

1. Private Cloud: infrastructure dedicated to a single organization. The organization or a provider owns and operates it. It may be on– or off-premises.
2. Community Cloud: infrastructure shared by a group of organizations with similar needs. One or more of the organizations or a provider owns and operates it. It may be on– or off-premises.
3. Public Cloud: infrastructure for shared public use. It is owned, operated, and hosted by a service provider.
4. Hybrid Cloud: combines services from two or more different Cloud models.

In the next post I’ll talk about what you need to do in order to decide whether or not Cloud is the right option for you and how to integrate it into your business model.

This appendix is significant in that it clearly defines various types of cloud services and the types of clouds in use, as well as different aspects of cloud services. This post will focus on how this appendix describes the various aspects of cloud services.

Appendix C: Service Strategy and the Cloud indicates that there are five characteristics of cloud services. These characteristics are:

• On demand
• Ubiquitous access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Measured services

I’ll provide a brief description of each of these characteristics, as well as how I’ve recently seen companies offer services that meet these characteristics.

On Demand

An on demand service is a service that can be accessed when and where it’s needed through either the Internet or an Intranet. “On demand” literally means it’s available when the user demands it.

I recently completed an XSLT class. To do the assignments for this class, students activated a host with specific settings. Once the assignment was finished and uploaded to a website, the host was no longer needed, so it was deactivated until the student was ready to begin working on the next assignment. This was helpful because the class required significant configuration to make everything work. Having an on demand service like this meant that students could load a pre-configured environment as needed.

Ubiquitous Access

Ubiquitous access means that various types of clients can use the service. Ubiquitous access requires three things:

1. The use of standard communication methods and network protocols
2. Coarse grained interfaces
3. An effective model for managing security-related aspects

An example of ubiquitous access includes services that allow users to store music, photos, or other information that can then be accessed by various devices such as traditional personal computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Resource Pooling

Cloud services are often provided through a collection of physical and virtual assets that are managed dynamically according to patterns of business activity and user and customer demand.

An example of resource pooling is having a collection of assets that can be quickly arranged as needed to meet customer demand. I once worked for a financial services company that pooled its hardware assets in such a way that we could utilize additional resources from the pool to quickly respond to demand for IT services.

Rapid Elasticity

A service that is elastic can be quickly and appropriately sized in-line with customer demand. What this means is that as patterns of business activity change, the demand for services is affected. A highly-elastic service is able to quickly add more resources in-line with increased demand or reduce resources in response to diminished demand.

Rapid elasticity has existed in IT for some time. An example of rapid elasticity I was recently exposed to was with respect to an IT organization’s network circuits. This organization moves large datasets across a portion of its network. At times, it requires more bandwidth and in order to achieve these needs dynamically reallocates networking circuits and assets. When the need for increased bandwidth diminishes, the organization positions network assets according to normal operating criteria.

Measured Services

Cloud services are often purchased according to a pay per use, or pay per utilization model. In order to offer that type of pricing arrangement, it is critical that there is some method to measure use of the service.

Measuring the utilization of services is nothing new. We’ve been doing it for quite a while in IT. An example of measuring a service comes from mainframe environments but has been used in other environments as well. Many organizations will calculate what is called a “MIPS rate”. “MIPS” stands for “million instructions per second”, and it is the number of instructions that a computer or service can execute per second. An MIPS rate will often not only consider this but also will weigh the average time various instructions take, consider the overall cost of providing the service, and ultimately produce a billing rate equal to the cost of 1 MIPS. I’ve worked with several organizations that billed internally for high-end computing resources in exactly this fashion.

In the most recent version of ITIL quite a bit of coverage is given to cloud-related topics and the impact of cloud technologies on IT service providers. The importance of this is to establish a common meaning of the various aspects of cloud services and how we as service providers can apply these technologies to deliver value to our customers.

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I’ve been to Las Vegas before when I attended Cisco Live 2011, but this is my first time attending the Interop IT Expo and Conference. Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and Interop — what a combo.

Like the majority of folks attending, as we walk by the slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels, I’m looking forward to learning more about emerging IT topics such as cloud computing and virtualization, data center and storage, and wireless and mobility, as well as security and risk management.

With over 100 sessions jam-packed with info from IT experts from across the globe, I am especially impressed with Interop’s list of heavy-hitters for their keynotes. I’m most excited about Padmasree Warrior, Cisco System’s CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering. I’m a fan. She’s also General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Business. In her keynote, she’ll discuss how technologies such as mobility, cloud, and video are transforming IT. I’m sure she’ll be great. Like I said, I’m a fan.

VMware’s CTO and Senior Vice President of Research and Development, Steve Herrod, will also be on hand to discuss the concept of the software-defined data center during his Interop keynote. I’ve heard he’ll explain how IT needs a software-defined data center that’s flexible, efficient, and the peak of automation to be successful in the marketplace.

Avaya’s Marc Randall will discuss application-driven networking. He’ll explain how applications, devices, and networks have seemingly advanced separately since their inception. Current IT trends require a more proactive integration of these technologies that can potentially be met with application driven networks.

Also on the schedule are Google’s Jonathan Rochelle, Dell’s Dario Zamarian, and Rackspace CTO John Engates, as well as Allan Leinwand, who is the CTO of Infrastructure at Zynga, the creator of the Facebook addiction of the moment — Words With Friends. I’m interested to hear what those guys have to say.

Also marked on my Interop calendar is the unveiling of the HP and Dreamworks collaboration, Cloud’s Silver Screen Debut: How HP & DreamWorks Animation Brought Cloud Computing to the Red Carpet.

I’m curious about the downsides to cloud deployment other than the security risks. I hope one session in particular, Building VMware Private Clouds, will hopefully cover how the enterprise can take virtualization to the next level by building cloud networks with VMware’s vCloud Director product, whether they are private, public, and/or hybrid, as well as how to manage ongoing operations.

In Las Vegas, if only for this week of Interop, BYOD still stands for “bring your own device.” There are three sessions addressing this topic: Tablets: Where Do We Go From Here?, Living With (And Prospering From) BYOD, and How BYOD is Driving Change in the Campus Network. Whether it’s supporting these devices and allowing them on your network or learning how to keep them off your network, BYOD has arrived. You might as well be prepared.

One more thing: If your boss cheaped out and told you to read post-show blogs instead of sending you to Las Vegas for Interop, follow my tweets at @GKJohnMarkIvey during the show to keep up with the week’s events. If you’re actually attending Interop, follow my tweets as well (there are three tweetups that I know of), and stop by the Global Knowledge booth to get the last of our Powered Up t-shirts designed by artist Tom Whalen.

My presentation was at 7:30 AM on Thursday morning. I had low expectations for the number of attendees, but I was pleasantly surprised. The rather large room was mostly full. People are interested in hearing what cloud-related incidents other organizations see as well as how organizations are handling those incidents.

My presentation basically concluded with this: based on the data, organizations that address cloud issues with some kind of knowledge management game plan tend to see both a reduction in the number of incidents over time and a decrease in the level of support over time. This is for a couple of reasons. First, with effective knowledge management the user community is exposed to, users develop the ability to diagnose and correct their own cloud incidents. Second, with effective knowledge management the organization’s operational support teams are better able to find knowledge when it’s needed, thus reducing the load on the service desk and other support teams.

Organizations that choose to ignore this by not implementing some type of knowledge management run the risk that the prevalence of cloud incidents will increase over time, and the amount of support required to address those incidents over time will remain high.

It’s clear that as service providers we can’t simply throw money and resources at the incidents we face, regardless of the source. Many of us work in environments that increase in complexity, and, with increasing complexity, the absence of effective knowledge management leads to more incidents that require higher levels of support.

The unprecedented growth of data, its increasing importance, and business’ dependence on digital information are leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are becoming more challenging to manage. From the perspective of data availability and protection, the information storage infrastructure is the most critical component of an overall IT infrastructure. It plays a key role in making applications work efficiently, both locally and across multiple sites. With the increasing complexity and criticality of storage, highly skilled and focused storage groups are as mission-critical as the technology being deployed.

Challenges Faced by IT/Storage Managers

These challenges are common to both large enterprises as well as SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) sectors of the industry:

• Managing storage growth
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a virtualized server environment
• Designing, deploying, and managing backup, recovery, and archive solutions
• Storage consolidation
• Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions
• Designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions
• Lack of skilled storage professionals
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a cloud computing environment
• Convincing higher management to adopt cloud
• Managing external cloud service providers

Each of these activities is on-going at various levels in each of the companies. Activities such as backup/recovery have been in practice for decades; still the professionals believe that they are not doing enough or not performing these activities well.

Complex Storage Environments

Data centers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia have deployed very similar storage solutions, including hardware and software. The sizes vary based upon business requirements, or in some cases a particular vendor may have a stronger presence in a given environment. However, on the whole, the deployed technology and challenges are very similar.

Storage Technology Segments

Storage technology deployment and its importance to the data center aligned with general market trends for each of the storage technology segments.

Each of the technology segments is unique, bringing its own specific business or operational values. For example, SAN and NAS provide connectivity options with unique functionality, while BR and replication technologies provide options for information protection against planned and unplanned outages. Technologies which enable cloud computing continue to generate significant interest.

Data Movement to Virtualized and Cloud Environments

Migrating to a highly virtualized cloud environment is a significant transformation, requiring a considerable amount of technology and business planning. Companies recognize the need for having an in-house team of professionals to lead the planning, design, and implementation of cloud and related technologies. Since cloud computing requires cross-skill expertise, IT professionals are required to have necessary knowledge across technologies that will be used in cloud infrastructure and services.

Formalized Storage Groups

Storage infrastructure is mission-critical, and a significant part of infrastructure budgets is allocated to storage-related products and services. A well-structured storage group of highly skilled professionals is key to building and maintaining high-performance, highly available storage infrastructures. Job titles and descriptions of dedicated storage professionals are evolving. With the advent of storage virtualization and cloud computing, the industry is expecting the expansion of core skills of storage professionals to include systems and networking skills.

Responsibilities

Storage groups are responsible for the overall planning, design, implementation, monitoring, managing, testing, and operation of all components in the infrastructure. Skills and processes are required to manage these tasks against expected expertise in one or more assigned “specialty” or storage technology segments.

Storage Group Skills and Performance

This is a key challenge for storage managers because it underscores the very real skills gap in their teams. Sub-optimal skills yield sub-optimal storage deployment. On the other hand, a well-skilled team will lead to higher productivity, better technology deployment and management, and optimal utilization of existing staff.

Sources for Hiring and Development

The most significant challenge faced by IT/storage managers is the shortage of skilled storage professionals in the marketplace. In fact, lack of skilled storage professionals is the most serious industry challenge. Considering the aggressive hiring requirements and plans, the lack of skilled resources becomes a serious bottleneck. There is a shortage of skilled manpower in the industry. Capable, experienced, and skilled individuals are usually not available to be hired.

Given that there exists a scarcity of certified or well-skilled storage professionals in the market, managers frequently resort to internal recruitment. Often internal recruitment involves moving an existing valuable employee who has different expertise (such as operating systems, databases, and so on) but has limited storage technology knowledge, which creates a knowledge gap in both technologies.

On-the-job training, technology vendor training, and self development by reading manuals typically cover usage and management of products and technology that is either already implemented or is in the process of being implemented. In addition, there is a need for wider and deeper training focusing on underlying technology concepts, planning, design, and management. This will enable storage professionals to independently and more efficiently design and deploy storage infrastructures that fully leverage the capabilities of all applicable storage technology segments.

Recommendations and Conclusions

From the perspective of data availability and protection, the information storage infrastructure is the most critical component of an overall IT infrastructure. It plays a key role in making applications work efficiently, both locally and across multiple sites. With the increasing complexity and criticality of storage, highly skilled and focused storage groups are as mission-critical as the technology being deployed.

Due to a lack of comprehensive storage technology education in the industry, most storage professionals have relied on on-the-job training, vendor product training, and self development.

Though probably adequate for day-to-day administration, a lack of broad and deep knowledge hampers the ability to make informed strategic decisions and to proactively plan, design, and manage storage infrastructure.

The basic concept of cloud services is straightforward.  When a customer needs some specific functionality, that functionality can be received directly from the Internet. Billing for the service is base on utilization.

One of the key benefits of cloud services is that they establish an effective boundary, meaning that the value of the service is available when needed at a predictable price, all without having to worry about the technical details or underpinnings of the service.

ITIL has not ignored the recent trends in cloud computing. In the updated Service Strategy book released in 2011, ITIL devotes significant space to discussions about the cloud and discusses several types of cloud services.

Individual Services

The first type of cloud services is the individual services that are offered to consumers. These are common things that we all often use these days without even thinking that they are cloud-based services. My favorite example of one of these was one time I was riding in a cab in San Jose, CA with another ITIL instructor. A song was playing on the radio that we didn’t know. He pulled out his smart phone, started an app that “listened” to about five seconds of the song, and then quickly gave us the title of the song and the artist.

SaaS

The second type of cloud service is known as “Software as a Service”, or SaaS. In this type of cloud service, the service provider delivers use of some specific software or suite of software to the customer. The customer only pays for the amount of the service that they consume without having to install the software in-house. An example of this is the many service management tool suites which are available on a subscription basis as SaaS offerings

PaaS

The third type of cloud service is known as “Platform as a Service”, or PaaS. In a PaaS setup, a service provider offers a computing environment and some specific tools that enable the customer to construct their own services. This lets the customer focus on the functionality provided by their services and applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure or operating system. As an example of this, I once took an XSLT class that required that all of our homework be completed using a well-known elastic computing service. When we wanted to do homework, we would simply visit a website and provision a platform, which was rapidly available and pre-configured for class needs.

IaaS

The fourth type of cloud service described by ITIL is known as “Infrastructure as a Service”, or IaaS. IaaS is similar to PaaS, however, the service provider is only offering infrastructure components without the tools normally offered as part of a PaaS solution. In IaaS services, the customer buy infrastructure components, such as raw processing power or storage, that they are then able to use to build applications and services of their own.

ITIL says more than this about cloud computing, and in future posts I will discuss other aspects of cloud computing and how it relates to ITIL. The key thing to keep in mind is that cloud computing and ITIL share much common ground. For example, the concept of a service, as defined by ITIL, is something that “…delivers value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks”. This fundamentally describes exactly why cloud services are popular — they provide functionality without the customers having to worry about the underlying costs and risks associated with creating that functionality.

A lot of new technologies and concepts are coming to the data center realm in response to the pressuring needs of new business requirements. In this post, we will discuss one of those technologies named VXLAN. We will try to examine it closely to understand what the need for it is in data centers.

Problem statement

“The Cloud is the problem.” Yes it is, but how? The most basic definition of the cloud is the abstraction of software from hardware, which means that you can run your applications on any hardware that can be rented from a cloud provider. This hardware will also be used to host other companies’ applications, so I can have one cloud system running the applications of multiple companies at the same time. This, of course, will enhance resource utilization and introduce some advantages like pay-as-you-go models, but it also raises some concerns from the network perspective. Now we will have a shared physical infrastructure used to provide resources to multi-companies or multitenants in that situation, so how we can guarantee unique MAC addresses and unique VLAN assigned to the multitenants using the cloud?

Even if somehow you did manage to have some rigorous rules in place so you can guarantee that all companies using your cloud will never run into this situation, this can only happen if you restrict each tenant to a special range of VLANs and mac addresses — administrators won’t accept.

Also, do we have enough VLANS to run the network on the same cloud? Even if it is enough, do we have switches powerful enough to run STP for each VLAN to avoid looping? Even if we do, it is still not an efficient way of using the network since half of the links are blocked most of the time.

Server virtualization has placed increased demands on the physical network infrastructure. At a minimum, there is a need for more MAC address table entries throughout the switched Ethernet network due to potential attachment of hundreds of thousands of Virtual Machines (VMs), each with its own MAC address.

A related requirement for virtualized environments is having the Layer 2 network scale across the entire data center or even between data centers for efficient allocation of network and storage resources. Using traditional approaches like Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for a loop free topology can result in a large number of disabled links in such environments.

So we try to replace STP with other technologies like CAT65k VSS or Nexus VPC, which relies mainly on port channel technologies. But instead of load balancing across physical links terminated on the same device, thanks to VSS or VPC we can now have a port channel terminated on two physical devices which is considered a good replacement for STP as it eliminates the need to block half of my links to avoid loops.

Now add hosting applications in the cloud. Cloud basic building blocks are pods, and a pod is a number of racks where each rack is a collection of prewired pretested devices that provide applications with system network and storage resources. When you deploy your application over the cloud, you might run into a situation where your applications are deployed over different pods, meaning in different layer 3 domains. Still these applications require layer two connectivity.

So to summarize all the above, here is what we need:

If we host two different companies’ applications, and both of them use the same VLANS or even the same MAC address, this should not be a problem.

If the applications are deployed on the same pod, meaning they are in the same layer 2 domain or on different pods, meaning the applications are in different layer 2 domains, the  applications still have layer 2 connectivity.

Also we need to effectively load balance the traffic across the PC since now most of the connections between the pods will rely on VPC and not STP.

The secret answer is VXLAN. So what is VXLAN? In short, it is the encapsulation of layer 2 frames in 4 headers:

• VXLAN headers
• UDP header
• Ip header
• Ethernet header

In the next blog post we’ll discuss why we need all of these headers.

The explosion of data, its criticality, and business’ growing dependency on digital information are leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are increasingly challenging to manage.

IT/storage managers and storage professionals across companies of all sizes face the following mission-critical challenges:

• Managing storage growth
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a virtualized server environment
• Designing, deploying, and managing backup, recovery, and archive solutions
• Storage consolidation
• Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions
• Designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions
• Lack of skilled storage professionals
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a cloud computing environment
• Convincing higher management to adopt cloud
• Managing external cloud service providers

Impact of Cloud Computing

Migrating to a highly virtualized cloud environment is a significant transformation. It requires a considerable amount of technology and business planning. Since cloud computing requires cross skilled expertise, IT professionals are required to have necessary knowledge across technologies that will be used in cloud infrastructure and services.

Complex Storage Environments

Despite the differences in industry segments and the data center size, there is a strong consistency across companies in terms of the technology deployed, storage management practices, and challenges.

Nearly all critical data is now stored on external disk storage subsystems. The average usable capacity is approximately 1.3 PB which is typically spread across multiple sites. Growth in storage requirements, larger capacity disks and subsystems, and affordable pricing have all led to large storage configurations. Storage subsystems, SANs, and backup/recovery technologies are most commonly implemented, followed by NAS, DAS, and replication technologies. Technologies such as storage virtualization and cloud (private and public) have started to emerge strongly.

Each of these storage technology segments is unique, offering their own specific business and operational value. Each requires a different set of skills for effective design and management. Lack of knowledge and expertise in a specific segment can lead to under-deployment of one or more of these technologies.

Criticality of Storage and the Need for Formalized Storage Groups

Storage infrastructure is mission-critical. Losing storage in a catastrophic situation can severely damage a customer’s business. When a disaster does occur, information on storage subsystems can be lost permanently unless a well-designed recovery mechanism is planned and implemented.

In addition to reliable equipment, a well-structured storage group of highly skilled professionals is critical to build and maintain a high-performance, high availability storage infrastructure. Storage groups are responsible for overall planning, design, implementation, monitoring, administering, managing, and operations. While the structure of the group, titles, and roles may not be standardized, responsibilities and tasks are common across companies.

The Storage Technology Knowledge Gap

Although managers prefer to hire experienced or certified storage professionals, a severe shortage of such skills in the marketplace is causing managers to resort frequently to internal recruitment. The skills gap continues to widen as organizations adopt virtualization and cloud computing.

The shortage of experienced storage professionals and the lack of storage technology education in the marketplace and in academics have restricted the growth of information storage and management functions.

1. Wireless and wired networking will provide access to support the rapid growth of devices and mobility.
2. Virtualization and cloud services will deliver content while providing a lower cost of ownership. This is why Cisco is now migrating most of its own business applications to data center virtualization.
3. The ability to quickly and easily collaborate between customers, staff, vendors, etc., no matter where people are, will transform business processes.
4. Video conferencing, the cornerstone of collaboration, already proves to be particularly powerful for doing business at a distance, both locally and globally.
5. Network security elements will converge, resulting in seamless connections and context-aware security that recognizes who you are, what you’re supposed to have access to, what device you’re on, and where you are globally.
6. A network technology architecture will connect any device across any combination of networks, increase cost efficiency by integrating network security and management, and improve business processes, including energy management.

Recreated with permission from Cisco.com.