The Business Case for Storage Networks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 8. Cisco Systems, Inc.

Note

I have been fortunate to be a part of IT hosting and infrastructure at Cisco Systems, Inc. for almost six years. As a senior systems administrator for the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) team between the years 1998 and 2001, I supported the day-to-day operations of the most critical hosts and databases at Cisco.

I joined the IT storage team in January, 2002 as one of two full-time project managers for a matrix support organization of nine individuals who spent anywhere from 20 to 100 percent of their time managing storage.

In 2002, the Cisco storage inventory was assumed to be 750 terabytes (TB) of raw storage, although we had no way of knowing the exact total. We had no fool-proof way of tracking storage frames or switches on the datacenter floor and no reliable way to estimate costs associated with any of our services.

In early 2002, the amount of storage attached to a storage area network (SAN) was approximately one fourth of the total storage. Since 2002, overall data storage has almost doubled, and of that storage, the percentage attached to a SAN has almost tripled.

In the past two years much has changed. The support infrastructure has changed drastically and there are now solid estimates for both inventory and fully-burdened costs. In addition, Cisco has entered the highly competitive SAN switch market with its own MDS 9000 product line.

As the adage goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Indeed, storage growth continues to increase. The migration to a Fibre Channel SAN platform (pre-MDS) was plagued by interoperability issues and immature products, a familiar situation for most early adopters of Fibre Channel (FC) technology.

The Cisco storage story differs from that of many end users only by degrees. As of December 31, 2003, the total number of managed TB at Cisco was 1460, or almost 1.5 petabytes (PB) of raw storage. By July, 2004, the total amount of managed storage had grown to over 2 PB.

Migration to SANs is the primary storage strategy at Cisco upon which hangs every other critical initiative (consolidation, recovery, and virtualization). The business benefit of moving to SANs is significant: a 20 percent increase in allocation efficiency, a reduction in maintenance expenses of approximately $5,000,000 per year, and an increase in operational efficiencies to 250 managed TB per storage administrator.

These successes are outlined in greater detail in this case study.

The IT department at Cisco has for many years focused on deploying cutting-edge solutions while maintaining operational excellencetwo strategies that always seem at odds with each other. The triple-digit growth rate of data storage has done little to mitigate the challenges of early adoption of Fibre Channel storage solutions, which began in the high-profile ERP environment in 1998. The rapid adoption of the new Cisco MDS 9000 SAN switches indicates a shift toward early adoption of innovative products as part of an overall strategy to achieve a vision of a consolidated storage utility modelthe ability to provide storage as a utility-like servicethat was outlined almost three years ago.

This case study underscores the functional requirements that continue to drive the need for new solutions to storage problems. It is debatable whether Cisco, as builders of innovative networking solutions, is more predisposed to early adoption of new products than other companies. However, it is a fair statement to say that those more familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are more likely to implement them faster than counterparts with less exposure to innovation.

Much like the other businesses analyzed in this book's case studies, the willingness to deploy new storage solutions and the ability to architect scalable, best-in-show environments rests squarely on the shoulders of a handful of knowledgeable (and typically overworked) individuals.