mache cReeGeR: What can people who
have to manage storage for a living take
from this conversation? What recom-
mendations can we make? What tech-
nologies do you see on the horizon that
would help them?
steVe Kleiman: Storage administra-
tors today have tremendous problems
that are not adequately solved by any
tools. They have home directories,
databases, LUNs. It’s not just one set
of bits on one set of drives; they’re all
over the place. They’ve got replicas and
perhaps have to manage mirroring re-
lationships between them. They have
to manage a disaster recovery scenario
and the server infrastructure on the
other site if the whole thing fails. They
have all these mechanisms for all these
data sets that they must process day-in
and day-out and they have to monitor
the whole thing to see if it’s working
correctly. Just being able to manage
that mess, the thousands of data sets
they have to deal with, is a big problem
that isn’t solved yet.
mache cReeGeR: Nobody’s in the busi-
ness of providing enterprise-level stor-
age infrastructure management?
steVe Kleiman: The people who have

solved it best in the past have been the backup people. They actually give you a data transfer mechanism that manages everything in the background and they give you a GUI that allows you to say, “I want to look for this particular data set, I want to see how many copies of it I have, and I want to restore that particular thing.” Or “I want to know that these many copies have been made across this much time.”

Of course, the problem is that it’s all getting blown up. So now, it’s not just, “What copies do I have on tape? What copies do I have in various locations spread around the world? What mirroring relationships do I have?” The trouble is that today it’s all managed in someone’s head. I call it “death by mirroring.” It’s hard. We’ll sort it all out eventually.

KiRK mcKusicK: What do you see as a possible solution?

steVe Kleiman: Currently people are building outrageous ad hoc system scripts—Perl scripts and other types. My company is working on this as are lots of other people in the storage industry, but it’s more than a single box problem. It’s managing across boxes,

even managing heterogeneously. We
have to understand that we’re solving
the convergence of QoS, replication,
disaster recovery, archive, and backup.
What we need is a unified UI for han-
dling all these functions, each of which
used to be handled for different rea-
sons by different mechanisms.
eRic BReWeR: That is a core issue.
How many copies do you have and why
do you have them? Every copy is serving
some purpose, whether as a backup, or
a replication for read throughput, or a
cache copy in flash. Because they’re au-
tomatically distributed you can’t keep
track of all these things. I think you
actually can manage the file system—
broadly speaking, storage system,
whereby you proactively assign how
many copies you have of something.
maRGo seltzeR: Users make copies
outside the scope of the storage admin-
istrator all the time.

eRiK RieDel: Because the amount of data and what it’s used for both increase constantly, you have to get the machines to help the users tag content with metadata—to help them know what the data is, what the copy is for, where it came from, why they have it,