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

Environment

Like many IT departments in the mid- to late-90s, the Cisco IT hosting group, whose infrastructure was aligned by business function, found itself supporting a vast array of applications of every imaginable size and criticality, from human resources and online sales tools to ERP financials and manufacturing databases.

By the beginning of 1999, it was clear that data storage was growing out of hand. In the fiscal years 2001 and 2002, data grew at 120 percent per year.^[2] At the end of the 2002 fiscal year (July 2001), the depreciated, annualized TCO for IT [3]

A number of cross-functional and enterprise-wide IT initiatives helped to spur storage consumption at Cisco between 2000 and 2002. In particular, Cisco IT chose to proceed with its Oracle 11i implementation as part of its "breakaway strategy," which was designed to increase operational efficiencies and more closely integrate IT with business processes. At a time when most software and hardware consumers were scaling back expenditures and putting major initiatives on hold, Cisco launched its plan to migrate its Oracle 10.7 Financials and Manufacturing applications to Oracle 11i, an investment that required significant supplemental storage purchases, ranging between 50 TB and 500 TB.

Support Infrastructure

In 2000, Cisco formed a team of part-time storage and systems administrators to focus on storage allocation and de-allocation across enterprise hosting environments. 11 individuals spent between 20 and 100 percent of their time on day-to-day storage activities. Cisco steadily grew its storage purchase rate more than 100 percent per year and the average workload quickly became unmanageable. Strategic projects, such as creating standards policies and documenting best practices, took a back seat to tactical, operational duties, such as disk allocation and performance monitoring.

Concomitantly, Cisco formed a global virtual team of subject matter experts, with representation from engineering, networking, and datacenter infrastructure teams, to serve as a clearing house for storage-related information and to act as a steering committee for the adoption of internal storage standards. The Networked Storage Virtual Team (NSVT) served as a source of information and standards for early adoption of IP- and Fibre Channel-based storage networks and garnered much respect as a "one-stop shop" for accurate and up-to-date storage information.

Although the NSVT had wide-ranging success outside of IT hosting, it had little tangible success within IT hosting because of staff limitations and the size of the IT hosting storage environment, which continued to grow out of hand.

Note

The NSVT now incorporates all members of the IT hosting storage services team (now known as Enterprise Storage Services) and retains representation from several other cross-functional groups.

Within IT hosting, lowering TCO remained a priority. The absence of direct action toward that goal, however, resulted in little progress. To compensate, the storage services team created a storage vision initiative to provide guidelines for the future state of storage at Cisco. The vision was simple: Storage services would be provided either a la carte or as a utility with service-level provisions for varying degrees of availability and reliability to meet client requirements.

The need to streamline operations, reduce storage costs, and increase application availability drove the wholesale migration to SAN technology. To complete the storage vision initiative, however, appropriate technology enablers were requiredspecifically, a scalable, mission-critical, multi-service SAN switch and enterprise-ready software capable of managing hundreds of TB of storage. Achieving the storage vision would also require organizational measures, such as the creation of a dedicated storage management team to ensure that resources were properly aligned.

As Cisco entered the Fibre Channel market, software enablers were still lacking, but the hardware enablers seemed to be just over the horizon. Before outlining the current state of consolidated datacenter SANs at Cisco, it is important to note, however, that the roots of SAN implementations could be found in legacy environments dating back to 1998.