The Undiscovered Country
Del.icio.usIn their 2009 study, IDC predicts a growth rate of 62.2% in unstructured storage. Nice to know, but what does this mean? The storage industry and its reviewers spend a lot of time talking about block storage and that’s all well and good for databases and the like. What about files? You know, files. The things that file servers exist to, well, serve. That’s the unstructured data part of the storage conversation and contrary to some reports and some opinions, its growth is explosive. Explosive is not a word often associated with control.
When we think about files, we are also thinking about people. In past postings, I’ve written about another misunderstood offering called Dynamic Storage Technology, but in this post, I want to focus on the merits of NSM – Novell Storage Manager.
If in their everyday roles, people are creating files and working together as part of collaborative units, is there value to an organization to be able to treat the files as objects managed by policy that is linked to the user, group or directory container? The answer, plainly, is yes.
I called this post The Undiscovered Country on purpose. The future is unknown so its discovery and making is both powerful and exciting. In this case I am proposing we step up and create a component of the future. And, yes I am aware of both the Shakespeare and Star Trek connotations.
Novell Storage Manager leverages identity and policy to manage storage automatically. Automation is core to much of what we do at Novell, be it systems management, governance, provisioning and virtual machine management. We created the Intel based server platform, and with it powerful, effective and usable unstructured storage. The time to recapture that space is right now.
Every customer is challenged by costs, complexity and risk. By using NSM to automate storage allocation and management, we can have a direct impact on customer costs. When customers add in heterogeneous storage models and the challenges around data duplication, both complexity and risk appear, truly a Hydra to face. The IDC study discovered a cost of $5 to set up a new user’s storage and $2 every time a change was made. After implementing NSM the customer dropped that to under $1 per event. That’s over a 70% reduction in a fairly uncomplicated environment. Imagine the impact if we remove risk and complexity as well as reduce expense.
IDC elucidates storage issues for the enterprise as follows:
- Be able to identify pertinent information quickly and retrieve if necessary
- Store information in the most appropriate location and manage it based on predefined policies that reflect the value this information represents to the organization
- Be certain that information is properly protected and is available in case of a disaster, deletion or corruption
- Manage the infrastructure without impact the end-user experience or having to retrain users
Sounds to me like a prescription for Novell Storage Manager, ours heterogeneous Storage Management Product that provides support for Linux and Windows systems.
New tools in the recent NSM 2.5 product release include enhancements to collaborative storage management, a new management UI, support for auxiliary storage and path analysis. The new release is capable of being configured as a soft appliance as well as offering a Custodian feature that keeps neat and tidy a history of file movements in the catalog so archived files can be easily located and restored with full rights preservation.
Storage Management isn’t about an OS, it’s about process, policy and control across multiple platforms, a hallmark of Making IT Work As One.
No matter your role, if you speak to a customer or prospect ask if any of the IDC documented issues has resonance? If so, Novell has the solution. To help qualify a prospect, they have to have… file servers and files.
Until next time, peace.