The top IT companies of the world are all talking strategy, new IT management concepts, best practices and maturity models, be it in enterprise software, security, data centres. Sun Microsystems is evangelizing new strategies and a maturity model for storage management.

‘‘Information is growing faster than storage cost is declining and faster than people are able to deal with management complexity’’, Robert Nieboer, Sun’s APAC Technology Evangelist, told Network Computing during a recent interaction. Nieboer is the co-creator of Sun’s Information Lifecycle Management strategy. He was in India recently to evangelise the company’s Information Management Maturity Model (IM3) in this market. China and the Asia-Pacific are the other markets into which Sun is pushing IM3.

‘‘Customers have no idea how much storage they have’’; ‘‘Almost nobody deletes any data’’; ‘‘The vast majority of data is never used’’; ‘‘Typically, enterprises use only 30% of the storage technology they have’’; and, ‘‘There is a lack of context in data storage. There may be canteen data from years ago sitting next to mission-critical data on some costly storage platform. Therefore there is meaninglessness and underutilization of resources’’: these are some of the insights that Nieboer has gleaned from being in the storage industry for over 26 years.

Nieboer said such chaos is ‘‘the result of hundreds of disconnected tactical decisions, absence of strategy. For a long time, whenever enterprises have needed more storage, IT managers have gone ahead and bought storage from whoever offered the lowest price, building up chaos over time’’.

He now proposes that IT managers must acquire a better understanding of what the business requires. ‘‘Then, business and IT leaders must negotiate storage policy’’. Such discussion would lead to guidelines on what resources to devote to what data. ‘‘Organisations must draw crisp, clear guidelines – for this application and data, these are the policies…’’

In fact, this is how Sun proceeds when it goes to enterprises to put them on the path to IM3. The Sun team first brings together IT and business managers and gets them to talk about data and storage among themselves. ‘‘Data classification as per business requirements is the way to begin. That will lead to storage policy and service level agreements’’. Then, it helps them draw up the guidelines of storage policy. In Sun’s experience with customers in the US, the whole process usually takes 4-6 weeks.

The next steps would be for the enterprise to get its act together on consolidation, virtualization and, importantly, automation of storage management.

‘‘Once you accomplish these and are good at process execution, you can get to strategic storage planning. In the end, IM3 is about measuring how good an enterprise is at taking business requirements and translating them into storage policy and then benchmark it against peers’’. Sun, of course, will offer all its hardware and operating system and management software to these enterprises. ‘‘Enterprises can hear us out on the IM3 and then go over and decide to purchase storage technology from another vendor. But what we have seen is that customers tend to see the benefits of going with Sun once they go through the 4-6 weeks of the IM3 process with us’’.

According to Nieboer data classification and automation of storage management drive down costs and complexity. Indeed, enterprises would also reap TCO, energy and green benefits on the path to achieving the various levels of the IM3. ‘‘A lot of the data that is unlikely to be ever used but which organizations will still feel the need to preserve for various reasons can be stored on tape storage, rather than on disks. The latter spin continuously consuming power, generate heat and thus requiring cooling. But tape storage is static storage. It does not consume power, does not generate heat, and does not require costly cooling’’.

Sun is in the midst of a program to evolve a data service, with a repurposed storage operating system and the new ZFS file system. ‘‘Servers and storage are coming together as in the SunFire X4500. We are creating an open source platform that will become the next generation storage system,’’ Nieboer said.