A popular cable television channel had different vendors for each tier of storage, including the archive tier and multiple vendors within some of the tiers. They were spending inordinate amounts of time and resources manually managing that environment. They needed a solution that would help them automate the management of that environment and give them a comprehensive view of their entire storage environment. They wanted the ability to easily manage data across tiers and various vendor products. In addition, they realized any multi-vendor enterprise storage management implementation had to integrate cloud storage and multi-site support. It was necessary that any new solution also support their existing disaster recovery implementation.
Requirements…
- Hardware vendor independence able to access and manage all their storage subsystems
- Support for multiple sites and multiple storage resource types including cloud storage
- Policy-based workflow engines driven by metadata.
- Enterprise data management scale and functionality
- Enterprise Storage Management scale and functionality
- Comprehensive reporting capabilities
- Automated and user transparent data migration functionality
- Storage pool management and Virtual File System support
MTMP’s Solution
The multi-vendor enterprise storage management solution required an enterprise class data and storage management software product and the expertise to install and optimize it. Both the selection of the product and the expertise were provided by MTMP Solutions. The implementation plan used a step-by-step approach to ensure operational stability, user transparency, and to evaluate performance characteristics in the customer’s existing environment. The initial phase included mirroring critical data sets across tier 1 and tier 2 storage systems from different vendors. The data to be managed had to be analyzed and key metadata harvested. Following the initial metadata harvest, automated policy driven workflow engines started to manage file movement between the two tiers. The next phases are expanding the tier mirroring across all production data sets; archiving tier 2 data to LTFS LTO tape; and copying key production data to their remote DR facility. All of these are implemented through metadata-based policies and schedules driving workflow engines. The solution is also capable of automating numerous ad hoc data management tasks like occasional data migrations or restoring archived data as required. The resulting multi-vendor enterprise storage solution combined enterprise data management and enterprise class storage management across multiple vendors storage products, creating a resilient and robust infrastructure capable of supporting and adapting to the customers’ ever evolving needs. For more information on MTMP solutions and case studies please contact us. Contact MTMP