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October 18, 1999

Recovery Strategies Take Center Stage
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Better storage management can equal better recovery times in critical situations, Pladsen says. "Like the traditional Tivoli management framework, we're building Storage Manager the same way, which will allow us to add in modules that are optimized for specific applications like SAP or PeopleSoft." Such optimization would let Storage Manager more intelligently manage that application's data. "And in a recovery situation," says Pladsen, "that means we can recover specific data instead of just large chunks. Like you could just recover a specific department's SAP data instead of an entire database and do it in whatever chronological order you desired. That means much faster recovery times."

Other vendors are also pursuing the link between storage-management and business-recovery initiatives. Computer Associates recently announced its SAN Integrated Technology Initiative. "SANITI really plays right into the hands of the industry," says Allan Mohess, director of storage marketing at CA. "The primary driver behind storage management used to be disaster recovery and backup. Those are certainly still issues, but business recovery more and more requires instant availability of lost data. That means finding all these pockets of distributed data in the enterprise and intelligently managing them from a central location."

Similar to Tivoli, SANITI uses CA's TNG network-management framework to provide better synergy to IT administrators. "We have network management and storage management, but not a combination," Mohess says. Using SANITI and related vendors' hardware drivers and plug-in software, users will be able to set policies and do everything they'd need to do to manage a network, he says. "And on the storage side, they'll be able to set application-specific recovery policies and better manage distributed data pockets."

On close examination of offerings from Tivoli, CA, and even Network Appliance, it becomes clear that these are complex hardware and software product combinations with a significant amount of proprietary technology involved. While they can certainly help with faster business recovery times, IT managers looking to migrate to true, open SAN architectures will lock themselves into these vendors' and their partners' product lines, observers say.

The intelligent storage management features discussed in Tivoli Storage Manager and SANITI are attractive, but Tivoli and CA downplay the amount of third-party cooperation needed to meet these goals. Neither company, however, is willing to predict full functionality before the second quarter of 2000.

"It will take a lot of third-party vendor cooperation," says Mark Griffith, product management director for Veritas Software, which is also unveiling a hardware-independent SAN systems management tool aimed for next year. "Our SAN strategy will be relaunched with an emphasis on software that overlays all hardware. But to do that we need a common user interface and driver base so we can virtualize all underlying hardware."

"This is years away," says Jon Toigo, an independent storage and disaster-recovery consultant in Dunedin, Fla., You've got to look at where we are now. There are no true SANs out there now, because the technology doesn't exist yet." Vendors such as Tivoli, CA, and Veritas are just extending their applications' management architectures and saying they have the solution, he says. "It's something of a solution, but it won't be the open-storage nirvana for which we're all questing."

For Tivoli to provide truly intelligent storage and recovery management, users are reliant not only on Tivoli's hardware driver management but the application-specific software module as well. While this combination will allow users better storage management and faster recovery times, Tivoli admits that Storage Manager's method for managing distributed data is proprietary, so users won't be able to just drop Storage Manager if an open solution does come along. A significant migration process will be required.

To get to such an open architecture, says Toigo, someone will have to write a new kind of driver capable of interfacing with any storage device. "That kind of driver support just doesn't exist today, no matter what the vendors say," he says. Until such a driver does exist, anyone designing a "hardware-agnostic" storage-management system still has to test copies of every hardware device the system will support to ensure that it works.

Terrence Louis Photo by Bill Kennedy "And that's not necessarily a bad thing," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "These solutions may not support true open storage, but there are definite benefits to them, especially when it comes to business recovery." The ability to intelligently recover only those pieces of data you need most is key to fast recovery strategies, he says.

Some early beta testers of Tivoli Storage Manager are pleased so far. "Some of our NT file servers are configured with 300 to 500 Gbytes of network storage," says Terrence Louis, team leader for open systems storage management at USAA, an insurance and financial investment conglomerate in San Antonio. "Until the last version of ADSM [Adstar Distributed Storage Management], we were backing up 1,200 NT and Unix servers every night in a linear fashion. That's not only slow, it's expensive." In restore situations, Terrence was able to use ADSM to set parallel restore streams simultaneously. But this could not be done during backup until the present version of Storage Manager.

"Tivoli is giving us even more with the new Storage Manager," says Louis. "The ability to economize bandwidth during backups alone will save money in staff time. And folks we have trained in ADSM won't require much of a learning curve to get to Storage Manager. It's a nice step."

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