How do you manage something that's constantly growing fast, with no end in sight? That's the question many Australian IT managers are currently asking themselves, as they size up their storage and data management strategy going into 2009. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer.
How do you manage something that's constantly growing
at an unprecedented rate, with no end in sight? That's the
question many IT managers around Australia are currently asking
themselves, as they size up their storage and data management
strategy going into 2009. Unfortunately, there's no easy
answer.
We went to the coalface and talked to three organisations about
their storage and data management challenges in general, and came
up with three different points of view.
Big bang
Web hosting and domain specialist Melbourne IT has a
lot of storage. In a recent interview with ZDNet.com.au, the
company's chief IT architect Glenn Gore pegged the total at just
under a petabyte (500 terabytes). An astounding 330 terabytes of
that was purchased in one hit last year. But the problem is just
not going away.
"We are getting to the point where we now are actively looking
at purchasing more storage because we have exhausted that
purchase," says Gore.
And that's the company's only problem. The nature of Melbourne
IT's business means that the storage needs of its customers change
at different periods of the year -- for example, financial
institutions get busy at tax time. Storage virtualisation,
including the use of dynamic performance tiering, has gone some way
towards helping Gore's team with dealing with the demands of the
business.
Coming from a company who last year bought 330 terabytes in one
hit, Melbourne IT's next move may give some insight into the
extent of the storage and datacentre issue hitting Australian
organisations. The company went out to market for a long-term
storage partner to help it keep ahead of the race.
Gore says the company initially ruled out Network Appliance for
being too expensive for its specific requirements, eventually
selecting IBM over EMC. "I think ... if you talk just about the
raw storage capabilities, EMC storage is probably better than the
IBM storage," he says. "But you have to take that holistic view
of, 'how do all the components of my storage fit together?"
The eventual solution includes a disk to disk to tape backup
facility, with the aim being that most data recovery scenarios
would see data recovered from a disk in the same facility. The
tapes are encrypted and stored remotely by a third party, with
Melbourne IT spending more than $10,000 a month on tapes.
Mobile datacentre
Box Hill TAFE might be in the same state, but
the datacentre and storage challenges outlined by IT services
manager Chris Tayler are different from those of Melbourne IT's
Gore.
The organisation recently awarded APC and Dell a contract to
build a state-of-the-art new datacentre that will give it enough
space to grow by about 80 per cent, including an initial 15
terabytes of storage and a new building. However, it's the devil
in the details that has given Tayler the proverbial headache.
The new datacentre will be the culmination of a year-long
project to shift Box Hill TAFE's existing datacentre, which had
outgrown the corridor where it was first established, to a new
site. While the location was only over the road diagonally from the
current IT setup, that diagonal is on one of the busiest
intersections in Melbourne.
In short, Tayler knew that moving the datacentre was going to
involve some significant challenges, but one he hadn't originally
anticipated was having to negotiate with the local council to run
fibre optic cables from one side of a major road to another.
It eventually proved easier to send the fibre further up the
road and back again in a U-shape, thus avoiding having to close
both branches of the intersection. Even so, Tayler still wryly
recalls hearing a travel announcement on the radio and realising
that a traffic jam being discussed was due to the datacentre
migration he'd been planning. "Digging up Whitehorse Road for
fibre channel was hard work," he tells ZDNet.com.au during a
recent interview.
Making the move had become inevitable, however. "We had the
usual issues in an ageing datacentre: lack of available power in
the area, lack of real meaningful physical security, lack of fire
survivability" he says. A building program within the TAFE
provided the opportunity to shift — "my datacentre was getting
squeezed out physically," Tayler recalls — but determining the
best approach was time-consuming.
"We looked at moving it to one of the outsourced datacentres
down the road, but the cost of communications was the deciding
factor there. We also looked at outsourcing some services, but one
of the limiting factors is we have a high-definition television
studio that we teach from and do internal resourcing from. After
much argy-bargy we finally discovered a location we could live with
and that practically the business could live with."
That process took close to a year, during which time Tayler also
had to find the million dollars required to make the shift, though
he had some leverage with management on that front: "It was
holding up building projects."
The project was eventually sold on a 6-year ROI plan, something
that many business finance managers might resist. Tayler
acknowledges that it's a lengthy investment, but says that's
inevitable: "A datacentre is a specialist thing. Its ROI is
longer, but its lifespan is longer."
Getting down to the nitty gritty
Like Melbourne IT (and most
large organisations in Australia), Box Hill TAFE has made extensive
use of virtualisation technology to solve some of its management
headaches, with about 40 per cent of the 160 servers in its new
environment being virtualised.
However, that approach has definite limits. "Virtualisation is
great, but the data farm is still growing sideways," Tayler says.
"We also looked to provide redundant power pathing. Because we're
only on one grid here, we couldn't do real redundancy."
Budget constraints restricted any further power protection
strategies: "Yes, a generator would be lovely, but that's another
$80,000 plus running costs, and I didn't have the change."
The relocation schedule called for a planned four-week
switchover from the old datacentre to the new one. One complication
in that process is that the TAFE campus runs for extended hours,
six days a week.
"Out of hours is a real issue We are running out of hours on
the clock where we can switch stuff off," says Tyler. "But we are
having a lot of scheduled outages on this project; it is
unavoidable. We looked at doing the big bang and bringing everybody
in on the weekend, but it was just too much and too limiting."
One benefit of making the change outside of improved server
management has been the chance to rationalise network and
telephony. "Box Hill never designed itself to have comms rooms in
logical positions in each floor. We've managed to simplify our
cabling and shorten a lot of cable runs. Of course, we've had the
other side where we've lifted ceiling tiles and gone 'Oh dear'.
In one case, we discovered a dump valve for the air conditioning
where it wasn't supposed to be."
Another big issue is that other IT projects, such as migrating
from Windows Server 2003 to 2008, have needed to be managed in the
same timeframe. "The first challenge is the datacentre, though we
do have simultaneous projects, because this is the real world,"
Tayler said.
Higher up the chain
Those storage and data management challenges
exist in organisations of all sizes, and often have to be managed
in parallel with other changes. However sometimes they aren't
noticed until higher-level applications work is underway.
For example, the National Australia Bank is in the process of
rolling out a major upgrade to its human capital management
systems, involving the use of HR-specific data marts, according to
its head of human capital management, Andrew Ross, who recently
spoke on the matter at an Infohrm user conference in
Queensland.
When Ross took on the role 18 months ago, there was a distinct
lack of information integration. Getting a figure from the finance
department on the number of full-time employees could take up to 12
months, rendering the numbers essentially useless; not the best
solution when you're a bank with close to 39,000 employees.
Ross knew that getting systems to work together would be
difficult in both technological and staffing terms. "You've got
to have multiple lenses, and you've got to have the systems and
the processes and the people to understand that," he told the
conference.
Multiple data stores; what an ugly story that was and still is. We'll shut them down eventually though.
NAB head of human capital management, Andrew Ross
The first stage was incorporating a full human capital
management system with dashboards for measuring key metrics. That
task is now largely complete, but the cultural change -- getting
the numbers accepted by other parts of the business as valid -- may
take much longer. "In a few weeks time when we roll out the new
dashboards, there's going to be questions," Ross said.
"People will question the validity of the data."
The second and bigger stage, which Ross anticipates will take
three years, relates to a problem higher in the software/hardware
stack that many organisations are facing as their data usage grows
and grows.
The NAB is building a series of human resources data marts to
allow further in-depth analysis that will draw on the centralised
systems currently being built by the bank, in the process
rationalising a number of data stores. "Multiple data stores --
what an ugly story that was and still is," Ross said. "We'll
shut them down eventually though."
Three years is a long time to wait for a functioning system, but
Ross is looking on the bright side: "At least we know we've got a
road map, which is great."
Have you got a storage or data management story to tell? Drop us
a line or post your experiences below this article.