11.3 Defining Simplicity

Today, most IT managers find themselves continuously adding more storage infrastructure, both hardware and software, and simultaneously increasing the complexity of their environment. While the cost of storage infrastructure continues to decline, the myriad cost-effective choices continues to increase in management costs. To address these concerns, some IT organizations purposely restrict vendor selection to only one or two players. This helps mitigate the troubleshooting and management complexity. Other organizations and vendors are working hard to implement sophisticated automation of routine storage management practices to drive down management costs in line with infrastructure costs, as shown in Figure 11-4.

Figure 11-4. Moving to a managed context environment.

Many of the management burdens escalating in current environments are routine tasks falling into the context category. Functions such as volume allocation, backups , and restores consume inordinate amounts of IT professionals' attention. So, the ideal path is to move from that of context overload in current environments to that of managed context required for survival.

Achieving storage simplicity requires driving both infrastructure and management costs to decline in parallel while increasing functionality and value.

Simpler storage infrastructure . Throughout the book, we have seen how integrating storage platforms into a common IP and Ethernet technology infrastructure delivers a flexible, adaptive storage architecture. The open -systems ecosystem driven by lower cost and more commoditized hardware and software sets the stage for simpler storage infrastructure.

Simpler management . Simpler management requires that routine processes and practices be automated in software. But no software package exists to automate undefined processes. Therefore, achieving simpler management of the storage domain begins with a plan of attack outlined in the following section.

Ultimately, the combination of simpler storage infrastructure and management leads to the following:

• Scalable, adaptive, flexible infrastructures

• Shorter return on investments through cost-effective implementation

• Reduced administration costs by automating labor- intensive processes

• Secure, reliable storage platforms