As with any household that hasn't held a garage sale in the past decade, so much of what's stored inside a 20-year-old mainframe can just go, and quite a bit of it is stored redundantly. "Consolidation" is the term of choice to refer to the key project of cleaning house.
Even though storage costs have plummeted, simply increasing or buffering a company's storage base or network won't go very far in solving the cause of its bottlenecks. Chuck Hollis, VP for platforms marketing at EMC Corp., says his company advises its customers to first make better use of the storage it already owns. "The first thing we ask people to do is understand who's using what--storage-resource management. It's pretty hard to figure out what you need if you don't know what you've got."
That management philosophy is part of the idea behind consolidating data storage while increasing the number of points of contact between data and users. EMC's Symmetrix DMX networked storage system is intended to multiply every user's access to data in a way that's transparent to the application. In so doing, it actually alters the nature of database-management logic. Databases such as IBM's DB2 can employ fewer locks to prevent alterations or updates out of sequence with one another, because the storage system has assumed the role of traffic cop. But unless it's managed properly, this kind of simplification can cause significant problems, because with redundant views of the data scattered all over the storage space, disparities and inconsistencies may emerge.
Because storage networking makes comprehending the entire process so much more complex, Hollis says, the management software must give administrators the ability to drill deeper. "It's very important that you go from application task, through the mainframe, through the storage area network, all the way down to the physical storage," he says. "End-to-end visualization is [also] extremely important when doing performance tuning."
EMC's ControlCenter software gives storage administrators visual tools for identifying and managing multiple layers of a mainframe storage hierarchy--logical volumes, datasets, qualifiers, aliases, and user catalogs--so they can resolve access conflicts in real time. And by redistributing access conflicts from the sealed vault of the database-management system to the open area of the storage network, administrators let human decisions play a role in conflict resolution--decisions that can be enforced through a well-reasoned storage-management policy. Users are held more accountable for the capacity they consume, and database transactions are smoother and more efficient.
A storage administrator, IBM's McCaffrey says, "wants to be able to centralize and share computing resources among multiple different users, multiple different applications, and have the management capabilities to understand who's using what." Redirecting application storage lets companies drive their resource assets "at 90%-plus, 100% utilization," he says.
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