Sumant Padbidri

Efficient and agile storage management in software defined environments

The IT industry is experiencing a disruptive trend for which the entire data center infrastructure is becoming software defined and programmable. IT resources are provisioned and optimized continuously according to a declarative and expressive specification of the workload requirements. The software defined environments facilitate agile IT deployment and responsive data center configurations that enable rapid creation and optimization of value-added services for clients. However, this fundamental shift introduces new challenges to existing data center management solutions. In this paper, we focus on the storage aspect of the IT infrastructure and investigate its unique challenges as well as opportunities in the emerging software defined environments. Current state-of-the-art software defined storage (SDS) solutions are discussed, followed by our novel framework to advance the existing SDS solutions. In addition, we study the interactions among SDS, software defined compute (SDC), and software defined networking (SDN) to demonstrate the necessity of a holistic orchestration and to show that joint optimization can significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall software defined environments.

Evolution of storage management: transforming raw data into information

Exponential growth in storage requirements and an increasing number of heterogeneous devices and application policies are making enterprise storage management a nightmare for administrators. Back-of-the-envelope calculations, rules of thumb, and manual correlation of individual device data are too error prone for the day-to-day administrative tasks of resource provisioning, problem determination, performance management, and impact analysis. Storage management tools have evolved over the past several years from standardizing the data reported by storage subsystems to providing intelligent planners. In this paper, we describe that evolution in the context of the IBM Total Storage® Productivity Center (TPC)--a suite of tools to assist administrators in the day-to-day tasks of monitoring, configuring, provisioning, managing change, analyzing configuration, managing performance, and determining problems. We describe our ongoing research to develop ways to simplify and automate these tasks by applying advanced analytics on the performance statistics and raw configuration and event data collected by TPC using the popular Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S). In addition, we provide details of SMART (storage management analytics and reasoning technology) as a library that provides a collection of data-aggregation functions and optimization algorithms.