W H I T E P AP E R

E n a b l i n g S t o r a g e Au t o m a t i o n f o r C l o u d C o m p u t i n g

Sponsored by: NetApp

Laura DuBois

January 2012

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

Today, most datacenters are trying to achieve operational excellence by providing the

right service at the right time to the right application. However, the growth in storage

capacity, datacenter infrastructure, and virtual machine sprawl, in concert with

constrained IT budgets, is driving firms to consider policy-based automation as a

means to gain operational excellence and improve service delivery.

Large enterprises and service providers seeking to build out either private or public

cloud offerings view automation as a central tenet in executing on the vision for IT

service automation. For this audience, service-level integration between management

and orchestration frameworks and technology components (storage, server, network,

applications) is required. For the midsize enterprise, policy-based automation is a way

to gain operational efficiencies by automating and simplifying complex, manual, and

time-consuming processes for provisioning, backup, restoration, recovery, and

cloning of physical or virtual application-specific assets.

This paper looks at the requirements of both sets of customers and the challenges

that each faces. It then overlays the NetApp strategy as a storage supplier in serving

both sets of customers by providing policy-based storage automation and thus

enabling IT service automation.

S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W

T o d a y ' s D a t a c e n t e r T r e n d s

Economic Hurdles with Data Growth and Storage Costs

Firms are seeing, on average, a doubling of data storage requirements every year. To

keep up with this reality, firms are making the storage budget an increasingly larger

component of the overall IT budget. This challenge is leading to increased investment

in storage optimization and efficiency technologies. Another core challenge is the

management of growing storage infrastructure. On average, every incremental

500–700TB of storage installed requires an additional storage administrator to

manage this capacity, according to IDC. This equates to spending an incremental

$110,000 in operating costs (fully burdened storage administrator) to manage every

incremental 600TB or $654,000 in storage cost. Storage capacity is increasing an

average of 52% annually, but storage management is not scaling to match this

growth. The last overarching economic storage challenge is low utilization in concert

with infrastructure costs, specifically floor tile, power, and cooling requirements.

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The average storage utilization rate remains low, varying between 30% and 50%

depending on the application and representing a multibillion-dollar challenge in

excess storage capacity.

Virtualization Brings Efficiency But Introduces Need for Automation

The ongoing investment in server virtualization has curbed power, cooling, and

physical server costs but offered no material gains in reducing operating costs. In

fact, virtualization has created a management challenge. As the ratio of virtual servers

to physical servers scales and the growth rate for shipments of virtual servers

drastically exceeds that of physical servers, the management of virtual infrastructure

(VI) has become the next big hurdle for datacenter managers. The management

processes, best practices, and integration of existing management tools are not

mature enough to satisfy the long-term demands of a highly dynamic virtual

infrastructure. Existing frameworks, built upon the need to manage physical

infrastructure, need to be maintained. Virtualization-specific management tools are

being deployed but require integration with higher-level management or orchestration

frameworks. Lastly, the management across virtual infrastructure, servers, storage,

and networks is still not integrated or automated. This integration is essential to

achieving the dynamic, pooled resource environment that is the underpinning of IT

service management.

Delivering the Right Service at the Right Time to the Right Application

Today, most datacenters managers are seeking operational excellence by providing

the right IT service at the right time to the right application. Midsize enterprises seek

to automate manual IT processes and empower application or VI administrators to

perform various tasks such as provisioning, snapshot creation, and restoration

according to consistent, well-defined policies. These firms need to ensure that

service-level objectives for availability, performance, and recovery are provided to the

application, application owner, and business unit. Often, with an investment in

virtualization, these same firms need to integrate these tools with the underlying

storage infrastructure. This enables use of familiar virtualized management consoles

to perform application- and/or virtual machine–specific storage tasks. However, the

largest enterprises and service providers seek to go several steps further, not only in

automating storage processes and integrating physical and virtual infrastructure but

also in coordinating the management of IT from higher-level orchestration frameworks

to ultimately enable IT service automation. IT service automation forms the underlying

foundation to effectively providing scale-out, dynamic cloud services.

The Evolution to Private Clouds for Large Enterprises and Cloud

Service Providers

The largest enterprises may consider public cloud services for specific applications,

business units, and use cases but are less likely to move wholesale to public clouds.

The largest firms, however, will evolve their datacenter infrastructure to deliver private

cloud services. A central tenet to the effective delivery of either public or private cloud

services is enabling IT service automation. To achieve this goal of IT service

automation, these customers must enable service-level integration between

management and orchestration frameworks and the underlying physical technology

components (storage, server, network, applications). This is necessary to provide

©2012 IDC #231836 3

end-to-end provisioning of workload, server, hypervisor, network, and storage against

a service delivery objective. Once the service is provisioned, ongoing monitoring and

management of the infrastructure as well as service quality and levels must be

conducted in an automated fashion. When out-of-policy conditions are detected, there

should be automated workload and resource balancing or tuning to return the

workload or service to expected service levels. The goal of IT service automation is to

dynamically allocate workloads across public and private cloud virtual and physical

resources based on service-level objectives.

T H E R O L E O F I T S E R V I C E AU T O M A T I O N : W H AT C A N I T O F F E R AN D T O W H O M ?

So, what is IT service automation? For the largest enterprises and service providers,

it is part of a journey or foundation to enabling cloud services. For smaller firms,

perhaps it's a concept so broad and sweeping that they perceive it does not apply to

them. Service providers and large entities interested in offering public or private cloud

services recognize that automation — and, more specifically, IT service automation

— is a foundational requirement to truly enabling cloud-based services.

IT service automation is the integration of technology, process, and policy to allow a

business or service provider to rapidly create and deploy on-demand IT services,

according to established central IT policy, on dynamic, shared infrastructure

resources, in either a public cloud or a private cloud. IT service management seeks to

provide end-to-end provisioning of resources (workload, server compute, hypervisor,

network, and storage) against a set service delivery objective. The practical reality is

that myriad management tools reside in most datacenters to manage a given asset or

group of similar assets. The challenge that both users and suppliers face is the

integration of these different management stacks across the technology domains.

P o l i c y - B a s e d A u t o m a t i o n

Inherent within IT service automation and IT service management is the concept of

policy-based automation. Automation is the critical enabler to large-scale virtualized

datacenter operations and cloud computing environments. Policy-based automation

leverages an extensible policy definition to allow a firm to control exactly how IT

workloads and resources are matched. Policy-based automation includes constraint-,

event-, and rule-based execution policies. Automation can be applied to production

environments for physical and virtual machine deployments, workload migrations,

patching and distribution, change and configuration management, storage

configuration, data protection, and security and compliance enforcement.

The benefits of policy-based automation include:

Reduce operational costs (do more with current staff)

Reallocate IT resources

Create more time for strategic planning

Mitigate human error

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Reduce infrastructure costs

Improve speed of application/system deployment

Organizations that seek to move to a less manual process for management of their IT

environment are increasingly considering policy-based automation as virtualized

infrastructure becomes mainstream. Automation is a critical element in an overall

strategy to improve workload automation and make more efficient use of staff and

capital resources. But gaining buy-in for automation is not without challenges. In order

for automation of any IT task to be accepted and proliferate, trust in the underlying

technology needs to be gained. Administrators typically gain this trust in the

technology by monitoring the tasks that are automated and observing the results over

time. Another challenge organizations face in automating routine tasks is gaining the

benefits of offloading humans from mundane processes without losing accuracy in the

execution of the task. Again, this assurance that the automation provides adequate

levels of accuracy is something that a human will monitor and gain comfort with over

time. Lastly, automation of tasks requires organizational change and acceptance,

probably the largest hurdle for a firm to overcome.

The largest enterprise IT organizations and major service providers are already

leveraging policy-based automation as a means to execute on a broader vision for IT

service automation.

A T T R I B U T E S O F P O L I C Y - B AS E D A U T O M A T I O N

Policy-based automation can occur only when configurations, policies, workflows, and

deliverables are highly standardized for ongoing repetition. Policies must be well

defined and consistently applied. Key attributes of effective policy-based automation

include:

Policy granularity

Breadth and depth of integration

Ease of use

Automation templates to enable consistency

Application integration

Service-level aware

Virtualization integrated

Secure

©2012 IDC #231836 5

T H E N E T AP P AP P R O AC H T O P O L I C Y - B AS E D S T O R AG E AU T O M A T I O N A S AN E N AB L E R T O I T S E R V I C E AU T O M AT I O N

NetApp's strategy for IT service automation is built upon the objective of helping

customers raise the efficiency of managing NetApp storage. NetApp is differentiated

as a pure-play storage provider not only in serving customer need by providing policy-

based storage automation but also in taking on an open approach to enabling IT

service automation. NetApp's policy-based storage automation in turn enables a

broader IT service automation. In taking this approach, NetApp is able to serve

several distinct customers sets and their requirements.

P o l i c y - B a s e d S t o r a g e A u t o m a t i o n f o r M i d s i z e

E n t e r p r i s e D a t a c e n t e r s

Serving NetApp customers without a previous investment in management or

orchestration frameworks, NetApp's policy-driven storage automation strategy

includes the automated management of NetApp storage to drive cost containment,

storage efficiency and operational excellence. NetApp's offerings include the

SnapManager family of application-aware plug-ins and OnCommand Unified

Manager, which includes the capabilities of the former Provisioning Manager,

Protection Manager, and Operations Manager products as well as OnCommand

System Manager. A central component of NetApp's policy-based storage automation

approach is exposing a storage service catalog where administrators can define

service levels (Gold, Silver, Bronze storage service levels). These service levels can

then be applied to a new data set to automate storage provisioning while also

applying consistent policies for attributes such as thin provisioning, snapshots,

deduplication, RAID, and storage type. Additionally, for firms making broad use of

virtualization management consoles, NetApp integrates with virtualization

management frameworks such as VMware's vCenter or Microsoft Virtual Machine

Manager (VMM) or vSphere with its Virtual Storage Console (VSC) and OnCommand

Plug-in for Microsoft.

NetApp's approach to management and automation of storage is taken in the context

of specific IT roles. For example, NetApp storage administrators can automate

manual storage tasks by leveraging the protection and provisioning capabilities of

Unified Manager. Application administrators can automate storage tasks associated

with their application assets by leveraging the application integration provided by

SnapManager products. Virtual machine administrators can automate storage tasks

associated with VMDK or Virtual Disk assets by leveraging the VI integration provided

by VSC and the OnCommand Plug-in for Microsoft. NetApp management software

provides integration between the application or virtual server and the storage

infrastructure to provide an administration experience in the context of the information

asset (e.g., a database, a VMDK, a SharePoint object, or an Exchange message).

6 #231836 ©2012 IDC

E n a b l i n g I T S e r v i c e A u t o m a t i o n f o r P r i v a t e

a n d P u b l i c C l o u d s

For the largest corporations and service providers en route to IT service automation,

NetApp's strategy is to provide integration between the management controls for

NetApp storage with higher-level management and orchestration frameworks. NetApp

management functions are integrated with orchestration frameworks through the

NetApp Manageability SDK, OnCommand Unified Manager, and orchestration-

specific adaptors. This allows administrators using management and orchestration

frameworks to control, execute, and automate NetApp storage routines based on

services exposed through the NetApp storage service catalog. Thus, the IT service

management administrator who manages the datacenter infrastructure in the context

of service levels can automate management of NetApp storage in that framework

model, leveraging the NetApp Manageability SDK.

The NetApp Manageability SDK provides all the functionality necessary to monitor

and manage NetApp hardware, plus full integration with the OnCommand Unified

Manager. Using the NetApp Manageability SDK allows customers and service

providers to offer a technical service catalog for storage. Through the XML-RPC and

SOAP APIs provided with the SDK, those seeking to offer IT as a service can

leverage storage services, instrumented by the NetApp service catalog, for use with

higher-level orchestration frameworks. Service providers or storage subscribers can

implement a set of services that abstract lower-level tasks for data protection,

provisioning, and multitenant configuration.

As an example, defined storage services and associated configurations can be

pushed to a management framework or custom application for self-service selection

of storage without involving a storage administrator. On the back end, the NetApp

Manageability SDK, in concert with the OnCommand Unified Manager, coordinates

the creation of the data sets, volumes, and Qtrees. The resulting effect is that the role

of the storage administrator has changed from performing these tasks manually to

defining and standardizing storage services that, when activated, call the appropriate

NetApp technology to automate the tasks.

C U S T O M E R AN D S U P P L I E R C H A L L E N G E S

Policy-based storage automation is a reality today, providing real operational benefits,

while true IT service automation remains a vision and longer-term objective for the

most mature organizations. As an industry, we will continue to move closer and closer

to automating tasks that have linkages between technology domains. However, this

route presents challenges for end users and suppliers alike. These challenges

include:

Need for technology integration and linkages between policy logic and execution

at the infrastructure level and across infrastructure domains.

Multiple management stacks remain, including legacy frameworks and

virtualization management tools. These disparate tools require onsite integration

that customers need to plan and budget for.

©2012 IDC #231836 7

Moving firms through organizational transformation as IT roles change and/or

converge because of increased reliance on technology to automate IT tasks.

Policy setting and standardization, specifically catalog definitions to describe

workloads, service objectives, and ongoing monitoring and measurement. This

requires extensive planning, policy setting, and detailed ongoing communications

between business units and various IT domains.

High levels of customization and architectural planning required to achieve IT

service automation.

S U M M AR Y

Storage is playing an increasingly important role in datacenter infrastructure. As large

firms seek to deliver IT as a service and smaller and midsize firms begin to consider

public and private cloud services, the role of IT service automation and therefore

storage service automation is paramount. NetApp's multipronged strategy to provide

policy-based automation storage offerings as well as integrate with higher-level

virtualization, IT management, and orchestration frameworks will position it well as

the market continues to evolve. In the short run, management and automation of

storage still need to occur and increasingly need to be done in the context of specific

IT roles. This is where NetApp excels and is doing more to integrate the management

of storage with higher-level frameworks than other suppliers.

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