But when did storage get so hard?

In contradiction to my previous blog, storage has now got a whole lot harder! In fact the sheer ease of implementation is making the whole process a lot harder. We can allocate/implement storage incredibly quickly these days; this is leading users to leave allocation till the last minute (they always did anyway) but now we can actually do the implementation really quickly but things are going in without proper thought and design.

My team’s OLA is two days from request to having storage presented; we can do it quicker but we try and ensure that change management is followed. So that bit has got easier but now we’ve got all kinds of other problems to deal with.

Which tier of disk, before the user would have a choice of Tier 1 or Tier 1.
Yes, I know SATA disk is much cheaper than fibre and you can get them for £120 in PC World next door, please feel free to put your business critical database on them but good luck with that.
Snapshots vs Clones and no they do not replace back-ups.
Replication; easy to implement but please understand that this does not replace your offsite back-ups by itself. And no, we can’t give you a zero data-loss option if you want asynchronous; well not without some kind of performance impact.
Performance of the arrays is much better, so people just throw things at the array and hope that it will perform. We used to spend hours, days and weeks laying out arrays to get the optimum performance; now we don’t get time and then when it all breaks, it’s a big mess to sort out.
Agile development methodologies which seem to be concentrating just on functionality and not NFRs. I need to know how many IOPs, read/write ratios, random/sequential to enable me to make a better decision as to where the data should live.

Some of the above is just down to educating users but some needs the vendors to work on and give us better tools to allow us to work faster and make better decisions.

You’ve made the grunt-work easier, congratulations. You need to make the really hard stuff easier as well.

We need better tools to monitor performance and proactively fix problems before they become problems. Good information about the performance of products; meaningful performance figures from a vendor with regards to speeds and feeds (SPC-1 gives me a high level indication as to how fast your array is for that known workload, unfortunately SPC-1 is not actually a business application) or at least a tool which allows me to model a workload easily to work out quickly how many spindles I need, how much cache I need etc. BTW, I know the tools exist; your pre-sales support guys have them, I need them too.

This is commercially sensitive information I hear you cry! So what!? It is the information that I need to do my job and maximise the return on investment. I don’t want to have to bother you when I need to do this bit of modelling; I certainly don’t want to pay you whenever I need to think about putting a new workload on an array. And yes, I’d really like my answer by Close of Business today; yes, I do realise that it is now 16:00.

So can we now have some tools which make the planning and design of storage infrastructures easier? For free would be nice as well!