ITIL and Storage Service Management Deliver Strategic Business Value and Consistent Quality of Service
Storage networks provide great potential for improved performance of data access, increased storage capacity for individual servers, and enhanced data availability. Storage networks can also improve the scalability of storage resources, which in turn enables IT to be more adaptable in meeting business and data requirements.
But this potential comes at the cost of much greater complexity in the storage environment. Simply connecting servers and storage through a network won't translate into immediate improvements in performance, availability, infrastructure adaptability, or use of existing capacity. With more components to manage in the path from the application to the data, storage networks must be explicitly managed as a service to provide these benefits.
Complex storage infrastructure environments require several elements in order to provide storage services to applications. One important piece is virtualization. Other key pieces are the software and practices to manage storage resources and performance. But just as important are the customers' IT service management practices — the way people in an organization deliver and support storage as a service provided to applications.
What's called for is a standardized approach to storage service management, one that addresses storage services within the context of the business and aligns storage service management with systems, network, and application service management. The IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, provides a process-based description of practices for how to do this.
What is ITIL?
As the name suggests, ITIL is an actual library, originally established by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce as a set of publications that outlined best practices for IT service management. Many people assume ITIL is a standard. However, it isn't; there's no way to become "ITIL certified." Instead, it offers an integrated set of publicly known, well-documented, proven practices for IT service delivery and support. Many enterprises prefer to base service delivery and support on ITIL process descriptions instead of proprietary service management practices that may eventually vanish along with the private consultants who introduced them.
When applied in conjunction with other operational services offered by Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services, ITIL provides an ideal framework for analyzing and improving the storage service management process—one that can be readily integrated with broader IT processes and initiatives. It forces the many parts of the business that touch storage to come to a common understanding of their needs and goals, and it documents the process through to completion.
Why storage service management?
Storage's main purpose is to serve applications, and its success or failure corresponds with the quality of service (QoS) it delivers to those applications. In a complex and fragmented storage environment, organizations may struggle with a host of issues. They may under-provision storage, leading to performance or availability problems, or they may over-provision storage, which locks capital investments in underutilized hardware. Storage units may fail to meet operating level agreements (OLAs) that define how service is delivered between storage teams and other areas of IT. Last, administrators may find it difficult to trace application problems to specific storage or network problems, and they may encounter delays in rolling out new applications. More... |
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August 2007 |
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