Mainframe Storage Lessons Extend to the Enterprise

A Paper by Fred Moore President, Horison, Inc. www.horison.com

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Mainframe Lessons Extend to the Enterprise

Introduction

“Storage demand grows faster than the effective deployment of management

tools, and the supply of trained people to manage storage has fallen behind the demand.”

Have you ever heard comments to this effect before? The IT community worldwide is

anxiously awaiting the point in time when it is perceived to be both easier and more cost-

effective to implement a comprehensive storage management than just adding more

hardware. That day may not be that far off after all.

Effectively managing storage involves far more than ensuring enough capacity is

available to meet increasing demand. In reality, that’s the easy part. Choosing between a

broad range of management tools from hundreds of vendors, selecting from a long list of

backup/recovery, date security, virtualization and business continuity products has

become too time consuming and complex 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 operating system. As a result,

delivering the overall levels of service and availability required by increasingly critical

business applications has been pushing the reality of effective storage management

farther away for most non-mainframe businesses.

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Storage Management Architectures Arrive

Storage management capability didn’t initially extend far beyond backup and

recovery for disk systems and the highly effective TMS (Tape Management System) for

mainframe tape systems. By the early 1970’s TMS was the popular de-facto standard tape

management system and it is now part of CA’s (Computer Associates) storage

management product family, called CA-1 Tape Management. CA-1 provided

management with the capability to control and protection of tape data sets and volumes.

It was the first tape management system to enable tape library inventory tracking with a

complete audit trail; tracking of off-site vaults; standard and customizable reporting;

support for pooling to ensure scratch tape availability; and utilities for controlling tape

and catalog maintenance activities. Storage management for disk storage was popularized

by HSM functionality beginning in 1976 by DSM/OS, an HSM product from Sterling

Software that quickly gained wide-spread appeal for its performance, ease-of-use and

policy-based capabilities. Via the acquisition of Sterling Software, DMS/OS, now called

CA-Disk, is part of CA’s comprehensive suite of mainframe storage management

offerings.

In April, 1988 IBM announced DFSMS (Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem)

for their MVS (mainframe) computers. Now commonly called SMS, this architecture

consisted of a set of related software products that marked the most comprehensive set of

storage management capabilities ever introduced. SMS provided a policy-based storage

management solution for large mainframe computer systems and is an integral part of

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OS/390 and z/OS systems. Its primary goal was to provide policies and automate the

most significant tasks of data storage administration.

In time, SMS became an effective policy engine for managing storage resources

and required users to get 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 components included with SMS but the 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 most cost-

effective storage technologies. Given the challenges and cost-saving opportunities of

mapping the right data to the most cost-effective level of storage in the expanding

hierarchy, HSM’s popularity on the mainframe grew quickly. Today, CA with CA-Disk

and IBM with DF/HSM are the only two companies providing HSM functionality for

mainframe systems.

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Though SMS was definitely not an end-to-end storage management architecture, SMS

represented possibly a most comprehensive achievement in storage management software

and it became a mainframe standard after nearly 10 years of evolution. In parallel, a few

innovative mainframe storage software companies continued to enhance SMS or its

individual components, such as enhancing DF/HSM with CA-Disk from Computer

Associates, by adding additional value and robustness to the SMS management suite with

their own products. Many of the remaining requirements are being met by these

companies enhancing its value while enabling effective storage management on the

mainframe to become a reality.

Storage Management for Non-mainframe Systems

What about SMS capabilities for today’s typical IT environment that deploys

multiple heterogeneous operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Netware, Windows and

mainframes? One of the biggest remaining unaddressed issues for SMS and a

comprehensive storage management solution is that it’s only available on mainframes

and is not extensible to any other computing platforms. Savvy storage management

vendors are addressing the need and significant business opportunity for an enterprise-

wide policy-based storage management solution. This is increasingly important since the

Unix and Windows (non-mainframe) systems now generate and account for more than

85% of the world’s stored digital data and clearly justify a legitimate, cross-platform

storage management solution. Many non-mainframe businesses now demand the

mainframe-class storage management functionality that they have counted on for over 15

years. Today’s biggest storage management problems are centered in these non-

mainframe systems.

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Throughout the 1990s, the easiest way to manage storage for non-mainframe

systems had traditionally been accomplished by simply adding more storage capacity.

This straightforward strategy worked fairly well for many small- and medium-sized

businesses for several years. As the management gap between storage capacities, the

ever-increasing value of digital data, and the number of trained storage administrators

continues to diverge, this strategy is no longer effective.

The Management Gap Widens

We recognize that installed storage capacity for non-mainframe systems continues

to grow faster than the deployment of management tools, and the supply of trained people

to manage storage has fallen behind the demand. As a result, a great deal of valuable

business data is not adequately managed or protected suggesting that fundamental

storage management tasks are being dealt with in a reactive manner, if at all. Aligning

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data and storage to the business has become one of the IT industry’s fastest growing and

most critical requirements. By 2008, it is expected that the average non-mainframe

storage administrator will be able to manage nearly 20 terabytes of storage while the

amount of data to be managed will approximate 80 terabytes. Because adding more

administrators is seldom an option, several steps can be taken to help close the

management gap. This gap is referred to as the storage management gap or “The Infinite

Disruption”.

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Today, the typical mainframe storage administrator manages on the average more than 40

terabytes of disk storage while the typical storage manager for Unix, Linux and Windows

manages from 1 to 5 terabytes. Remember these are averages and can vary considerably.

It has now become a primary goal of storage administrators using these systems to

achieve the same high-level storage management capabilities available on the mainframe.

Until recently, if you wanted to manage all storage effectively with robust tools and

intelligent policy-based software, then moving to a mainframe was the only solution

available.

Non-mainframe Systems Issues Mount

Why is storage management so much more of a problem for non-mainframe

systems than mainframes? Why does a storage administrator on a mainframe manage, on

the average, well in excess of 40 terabytes of online storage while non-mainframe storage

administrators manage just a few terabytes in comparison? The single requirement for a

centralized, end-to-end storage management solution using a “single pane of glass” for

mainframe and non-mainframe systems that really works across multiple operating

systems could not be greater!

Beyond mainframes, the Unix operating systems host more critical, data intensive

applications than any other operating system. The storage services provided by Unix that

are present today are basically the same ones that existed over 20 years ago when Sun

first released NFS (Network File System) and have seen little improvement since. There

have been no significant enhancements to non-mainframe operating systems in terms of

storage services since those early days when a “large” Unix server had about 1 gigabyte

of disk storage and PC’s were just standalone boxes. No one knew then that these

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distributed computing systems would one day be asked to do the work of a mainframe

and to access as much, if not more data than their mainframe counterparts.

Meeting the Challenge…

The non-mainframe systems were originally designed to be computational

systems, not managers of large storage pools as they are today. If much foresight had

existed, the limited storage services for these systems would have been viewed as

unacceptable and would have been addressed long before now. Multiple versions of Unix

emerged and each adopted their own often incompatible file systems, volume managers,

backup/recovery/security products and data movers making interoperability between

unlike platforms difficult to achieve. Most non-mainframe operating systems had non-

interchangeable components requiring each to have their own unique solutions and

therefore further increasing storage management costs.

By the end of 1990’s hundreds of independent storage management software

products were developed attempting to address the increasing number of mainframe and

non-mainframe storage management problems which had became painfully apparent to

the entire storage industry. There is little basis to believe that non-mainframe systems can

be scaled to the level necessary to replace the mainframe class servers without having the

same type of tools available that made their legendary predecessor so successful. Non-

mainframe systems don’t have effective counterparts for key management components

such as DF/SMS, CA-Disk, CA-1 or DF/HSM for example.

Missing Pieces

Some pieces were still missing however as the 21st century began. Deployment of

end-to-end, cross-platform management solutions providing functionality such as SRM

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(Storage Resource Manager) and SAN (Storage Area Network) virtualization capabilities

remained scarce. No single system can do everything however and a few leading-edge

ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) are extending their significant suite of mainframe

-class storage management capabilities to non-mainframe systems yielding an even more

robust management solution. Nonetheless, the looming challenge for non-mainframe

systems remains much larger.

The critical list of storage management requirements for IT organizations includes:

●A centralized, single console integrating SRM (Storage Resource Management)

and all related storage management and reporting capabilities for mainframe and

non-mainframe systems (a common look and feel)

●More effective utilization of tape and disk resources

●A single, effective HSM for non-mainframe systems

- More analysis, less data, policy-based

●An easy to implement method to meet backup window requirements

●A way to improve storage management productivity without increasing staff

●A way to implement and manage cross-platform SANs

● A knowledge base to log, trend and solve problems from current and historical

data

● Improved business continuity by providing alerts with policy-based actions

(pro-active management) to address problems before they become

an issue

●Tools to meet SLAs

●Improved levels of data security

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The company that best understands and addresses these critical issues will be ideally

positioned to become the industry leader for storage management solutions.

Overcoming the Barriers - SMS Capabilities for Non-mainframe Systems

There are numerous software companies providing solutions to various storage

management problems for non-mainframe systems. The sheer number of product choices

makes buying decisions complicated and it is impossible for all the various products to

interoperate. This suggests that a consolidation of these vendors will continue, and the

goal of true Open Systems interoperability will continue to be a dream versus a reality for

some time. Multiple HSM-like products exist for open systems but none readily support

the three fundamental Open Systems computing platforms; Unix, Windows, Linux and

the range of databases and file systems that that are normally deployed. Therefore a

business often needs to install multiple, semi-compatible, or non-compatible software

products to attempt to manage their storage environment. This is exactly what businesses

no longer want to do. Coupled with steadily increasing storage growth, this represents an

unsustainable strategy.

Conclusion

The era of combining weak operating system storage management services with

very large storage subsystems is rapidly coming to a close as leading-edge ISVs are

intensifying efforts to resolve this mounting problem area and are starting to bring

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mainframe-class capabilities to the rest of the IT community. The storage industry is now

embarking on a new course leaving behind many of the tenants that defined the way the

non-mainframe storage management business was conducted for the last 30 years.

Expect cutting-edge technologies that have the potential to offset the losses in the old

markets to move into, and create new markets, and possibly new industries, as the value

of data skyrockets. Storage management will most likely be one of them.

End of WP CA001

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