1. WHITE P APER
Enabling Storage Automation for Cloud Computing
Sponsored by: NetApp
Laura DuBois
January 2012
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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Today, most datacenters are trying to achieve operational excellence by providing the
right service at the right time to the right application. However, the growth in storage
capacity, datacenter infrastructure, and virtual machine sprawl, in concert with
constrained IT budgets, is driving firms to consider policy-based automation as a
means to gain operational excellence and improve service delivery.
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Large enterprises and service providers seeking to build out either private or public
cloud offerings view automation as a central tenet in executing on the vision for IT
service automation. For this audience, service-level integration between management
and orchestration frameworks and technology components (storage, server, network,
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applications) is required. For the midsize enterprise, policy-based automation is a way
to gain operational efficiencies by automating and simplifying complex, manual, and
time-consuming processes for provisioning, backup, restoration, recovery, and
cloning of physical or virtual application-specific assets.
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This paper looks at the requirements of both sets of customers and the challenges
that each faces. It then overlays the NetApp strategy as a storage supplier in serving
both sets of customers by providing policy-based storage automation and thus
enabling IT service automation.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Today's Datacenter Trends
Economic Hurdles with Data Growth and Storage Costs
Firms are seeing, on average, a doubling of data storage requirements every year. To
keep up with this reality, firms are making the storage budget an increasingly larger
component of the overall IT budget. This challenge is leading to increased investment
in storage optimization and efficiency technologies. Another core challenge is the
management of growing storage infrastructure. On average, every incremental
500–700TB of storage installed requires an additional storage administrator to
manage this capacity, according to IDC. This equates to spending an incremental
$110,000 in operating costs (fully burdened storage administrator) to manage every
incremental 600TB or $654,000 in storage cost. Storage capacity is increasing an
average of 52% annually, but storage management is not scaling to match this
growth. The last overarching economic storage challenge is low utilization in concert
with infrastructure costs, specifically floor tile, power, and cooling requirements.

2. The average storage utilization rate remains low, varying between 30% and 50%
depending on the application and representing a multibillion-dollar challenge in
excess storage capacity.
Virtualization Brings Efficiency But Introduces Need for Automation
The ongoing investment in server virtualization has curbed power, cooling, and
physical server costs but offered no material gains in reducing operating costs. In
fact, virtualization has created a management challenge. As the ratio of virtual servers
to physical servers scales and the growth rate for shipments of virtual servers
drastically exceeds that of physical servers, the management of virtual infrastructure
(VI) has become the next big hurdle for datacenter managers. The management
processes, best practices, and integration of existing management tools are not
mature enough to satisfy the long-term demands of a highly dynamic virtual
infrastructure. Existing frameworks, built upon the need to manage physical
infrastructure, need to be maintained. Virtualization-specific management tools are
being deployed but require integration with higher-level management or orchestration
frameworks. Lastly, the management across virtual infrastructure, servers, storage,
and networks is still not integrated or automated. This integration is essential to
achieving the dynamic, pooled resource environment that is the underpinning of IT
service management.
Delivering the Right Service at the Right Time to the Right Application
Today, most datacenters managers are seeking operational excellence by providing
the right IT service at the right time to the right application. Midsize enterprises seek
to automate manual IT processes and empower application or VI administrators to
perform various tasks such as provisioning, snapshot creation, and restoration
according to consistent, well-defined policies. These firms need to ensure that
service-level objectives for availability, performance, and recovery are provided to the
application, application owner, and business unit. Often, with an investment in
virtualization, these same firms need to integrate these tools with the underlying
storage infrastructure. This enables use of familiar virtualized management consoles
to perform application- and/or virtual machine–specific storage tasks. However, the
largest enterprises and service providers seek to go several steps further, not only in
automating storage processes and integrating physical and virtual infrastructure but
also in coordinating the management of IT from higher-level orchestration frameworks
to ultimately enable IT service automation. IT service automation forms the underlying
foundation to effectively providing scale-out, dynamic cloud services.
The Evolution to Private Clouds for Large Enterprises and Cloud
Service Providers
The largest enterprises may consider public cloud services for specific applications,
business units, and use cases but are less likely to move wholesale to public clouds.
The largest firms, however, will evolve their datacenter infrastructure to deliver private
cloud services. A central tenet to the effective delivery of either public or private cloud
services is enabling IT service automation. To achieve this goal of IT service
automation, these customers must enable service-level integration between
management and orchestration frameworks and the underlying physical technology
components (storage, server, network, applications). This is necessary to provide
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3. end-to-end provisioning of workload, server, hypervisor, network, and storage against
a service delivery objective. Once the service is provisioned, ongoing monitoring and
management of the infrastructure as well as service quality and levels must be
conducted in an automated fashion. When out-of-policy conditions are detected, there
should be automated workload and resource balancing or tuning to return the
workload or service to expected service levels. The goal of IT service automation is to
dynamically allocate workloads across public and private cloud virtual and physical
resources based on service-level objectives.
THE ROLE OF IT SERVI CE AUTOMATION:
WHAT CAN IT OFFER AN D TO WHOM?
So, what is IT service automation? For the largest enterprises and service providers,
it is part of a journey or foundation to enabling cloud services. For smaller firms,
perhaps it's a concept so broad and sweeping that they perceive it does not apply to
them. Service providers and large entities interested in offering public or private cloud
services recognize that automation — and, more specifically, IT service automation
— is a foundational requirement to truly enabling cloud-based services.
IT service automation is the integration of technology, process, and policy to allow a
business or service provider to rapidly create and deploy on-demand IT services,
according to established central IT policy, on dynamic, shared infrastructure
resources, in either a public cloud or a private cloud. IT service management seeks to
provide end-to-end provisioning of resources (workload, server compute, hypervisor,
network, and storage) against a set service delivery objective. The practical reality is
that myriad management tools reside in most datacenters to manage a given asset or
group of similar assets. The challenge that both users and suppliers face is the
integration of these different management stacks across the technology domains.
Policy-Based Automation
Inherent within IT service automation and IT service management is the concept of
policy-based automation. Automation is the critical enabler to large-scale virtualized
datacenter operations and cloud computing environments. Policy-based automation
leverages an extensible policy definition to allow a firm to control exactly how IT
workloads and resources are matched. Policy-based automation includes constraint-,
event-, and rule-based execution policies. Automation can be applied to production
environments for physical and virtual machine deployments, workload migrations,
patching and distribution, change and configuration management, storage
configuration, data protection, and security and compliance enforcement.
The benefits of policy-based automation include:
 Reduce operational costs (do more with current staff)
 Reallocate IT resources
 Create more time for strategic planning
 Mitigate human error
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4.  Reduce infrastructure costs
 Improve speed of application/system deployment
Organizations that seek to move to a less manual process for management of their IT
environment are increasingly considering policy-based automation as virtualized
infrastructure becomes mainstream. Automation is a critical element in an overall
strategy to improve workload automation and make more efficient use of staff and
capital resources. But gaining buy-in for automation is not without challenges. In order
for automation of any IT task to be accepted and proliferate, trust in the underlying
technology needs to be gained. Administrators typically gain this trust in the
technology by monitoring the tasks that are automated and observing the results over
time. Another challenge organizations face in automating routine tasks is gaining the
benefits of offloading humans from mundane processes without losing accuracy in the
execution of the task. Again, this assurance that the automation provides adequate
levels of accuracy is something that a human will monitor and gain comfort with over
time. Lastly, automation of tasks requires organizational change and acceptance,
probably the largest hurdle for a firm to overcome.
The largest enterprise IT organizations and major service providers are already
leveraging policy-based automation as a means to execute on a broader vision for IT
service automation.
ATTRIBUTES OF POLICY -BASED
AUTOMATION
Policy-based automation can occur only when configurations, policies, workflows, and
deliverables are highly standardized for ongoing repetition. Policies must be well
defined and consistently applied. Key attributes of effective policy-based automation
include:
 Policy granularity
 Breadth and depth of integration
 Ease of use
 Automation templates to enable consistency
 Application integration
 Service-level aware
 Virtualization integrated
 Secure
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5. THE NETAPP AP PRO ACH TO POLICY-BASED
STORAGE AUTO MATION AS AN ENABLER TO
IT SERVICE AUTOMATIO N
NetApp's strategy for IT service automation is built upon the objective of helping
customers raise the efficiency of managing NetApp storage. NetApp is differentiated
as a pure-play storage provider not only in serving customer need by providing policy-
based storage automation but also in taking on an open approach to enabling IT
service automation. NetApp's policy-based storage automation in turn enables a
broader IT service automation. In taking this approach, NetApp is able to serve
several distinct customers sets and their requirements.
Policy-Based Storage Automation for Midsize
Enterprise Datacenters
Serving NetApp customers without a previous investment in management or
orchestration frameworks, NetApp's policy-driven storage automation strategy
includes the automated management of NetApp storage to drive cost containment,
storage efficiency and operational excellence. NetApp's offerings include the
SnapManager family of application-aware plug-ins and OnCommand Unified
Manager, which includes the capabilities of the former Provisioning Manager,
Protection Manager, and Operations Manager products as well as OnCommand
System Manager. A central component of NetApp's policy-based storage automation
approach is exposing a storage service catalog where administrators can define
service levels (Gold, Silver, Bronze storage service levels). These service levels can
then be applied to a new data set to automate storage provisioning while also
applying consistent policies for attributes such as thin provisioning, snapshots,
deduplication, RAID, and storage type. Additionally, for firms making broad use of
virtualization management consoles, NetApp integrates with virtualization
management frameworks such as VMware's vCenter or Microsoft Virtual Machine
Manager (VMM) or vSphere with its Virtual Storage Console (VSC) and OnCommand
Plug-in for Microsoft.
NetApp's approach to management and automation of storage is taken in the context
of specific IT roles. For example, NetApp storage administrators can automate
manual storage tasks by leveraging the protection and provisioning capabilities of
Unified Manager. Application administrators can automate storage tasks associated
with their application assets by leveraging the application integration provided by
SnapManager products. Virtual machine administrators can automate storage tasks
associated with VMDK or Virtual Disk assets by leveraging the VI integration provided
by VSC and the OnCommand Plug-in for Microsoft. NetApp management software
provides integration between the application or virtual server and the storage
infrastructure to provide an administration experience in the context of the information
asset (e.g., a database, a VMDK, a SharePoint object, or an Exchange message).
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6. Enabling IT Service Automation for Private
and Public Clouds
For the largest corporations and service providers en route to IT service automation,
NetApp's strategy is to provide integration between the management controls for
NetApp storage with higher-level management and orchestration frameworks. NetApp
management functions are integrated with orchestration frameworks through the
NetApp Manageability SDK, OnCommand Unified Manager, and orchestration-
specific adaptors. This allows administrators using management and orchestration
frameworks to control, execute, and automate NetApp storage routines based on
services exposed through the NetApp storage service catalog. Thus, the IT service
management administrator who manages the datacenter infrastructure in the context
of service levels can automate management of NetApp storage in that framework
model, leveraging the NetApp Manageability SDK.
The NetApp Manageability SDK provides all the functionality necessary to monitor
and manage NetApp hardware, plus full integration with the OnCommand Unified
Manager. Using the NetApp Manageability SDK allows customers and service
providers to offer a technical service catalog for storage. Through the XML-RPC and
SOAP APIs provided with the SDK, those seeking to offer IT as a service can
leverage storage services, instrumented by the NetApp service catalog, for use with
higher-level orchestration frameworks. Service providers or storage subscribers can
implement a set of services that abstract lower-level tasks for data protection,
provisioning, and multitenant configuration.
As an example, defined storage services and associated configurations can be
pushed to a management framework or custom application for self-service selection
of storage without involving a storage administrator. On the back end, the NetApp
Manageability SDK, in concert with the OnCommand Unified Manager, coordinates
the creation of the data sets, volumes, and Qtrees. The resulting effect is that the role
of the storage administrator has changed from performing these tasks manually to
defining and standardizing storage services that, when activated, call the appropriate
NetApp technology to automate the tasks.
CUSTOMER AND SUPPLIE R CHALLENGES
Policy-based storage automation is a reality today, providing real operational benefits,
while true IT service automation remains a vision and longer-term objective for the
most mature organizations. As an industry, we will continue to move closer and closer
to automating tasks that have linkages between technology domains. However, this
route presents challenges for end users and suppliers alike. These challenges
include:
 Need for technology integration and linkages between policy logic and execution
at the infrastructure level and across infrastructure domains.
 Multiple management stacks remain, including legacy frameworks and
virtualization management tools. These disparate tools require onsite integration
that customers need to plan and budget for.
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7.  Moving firms through organizational transformation as IT roles change and/or
converge because of increased reliance on technology to automate IT tasks.
 Policy setting and standardization, specifically catalog definitions to describe
workloads, service objectives, and ongoing monitoring and measurement. This
requires extensive planning, policy setting, and detailed ongoing communications
between business units and various IT domains.
 High levels of customization and architectural planning required to achieve IT
service automation.
SUMMARY
Storage is playing an increasingly important role in datacenter infrastructure. As large
firms seek to deliver IT as a service and smaller and midsize firms begin to consider
public and private cloud services, the role of IT service automation and therefore
storage service automation is paramount. NetApp's multipronged strategy to provide
policy-based automation storage offerings as well as integrate with higher-level
virtualization, IT management, and orchestration frameworks will position it well as
the market continues to evolve. In the short run, management and automation of
storage still need to occur and increasingly need to be done in the context of specific
IT roles. This is where NetApp excels and is doing more to integrate the management
of storage with higher-level frameworks than other suppliers.
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