Best practices in SAN change management

Computerworld - When it comes to change, SAN managers and administrators suffer a lot of sleepless nights.
Storage-area network complexity has grown much faster than the ability of current software to manage and grow storage networks and can cause disruptive if not fatal errors. Manual methods and cumbersome spreadsheets have proved to be time-consuming and prone to mistakes, precluding IT organizations from attaining high SAN stability and application availability -- a priority for CIOs.
The complexity stems from the multiple configurations of devices that must be perfectly synchronized to attain a correct access path between an application and its data. Storage managers must be able to accurately correlate attributes such as redundancy, performance, security, disaster recovery, clustering and backup with business rules and best practices. The complexity of attaining and managing access paths grows exponentially with the number of servers and applications connected to the SAN. Furthermore, the larger the SAN, the greater the number of changes required and the shorter the time period in which to make them.
In a large enterprise SAN, thousands of changes are made each year. Each change consists of multiple individual local actions, and each could affect any number of access paths in a variety of ways. This is a frightening idea, given that 60% to 80% of SAN problems occur from errors made in manual changes, according to industry analysts. These manual changes range from simple day-to-day changes, such as adding a server and alerting zoning, to a major consolidation or migration.
Given the complexities of SANs, a change management application can be a useful tool for understanding, managing and fixing logical and physical relationships in an end-to-end SAN. In evaluating SAN management applications, organizations should consider the following:

• Be aware that generic storage resource management reporting applications won't solve your change management problems alone.


• Decide on a product only after it's installed, running and showing value in your environment.


• Always account for the cost and risk of deploying the product. For example, how much will it cost to deploy and maintain agents on all hosts in the data center?


• There is no reason for a change management product to be intrusive to your SAN environment. Select a product that's agentless, out-of-band and doesn't change the SAN.


• Make sure that the change management system provides you a choice of future hardware and software decisions and doesn't tie you to a specific vendor.


• Look for a product that provides change management for a wide scope of configurations and events across the SAN and isn't limited to minimal basic parameters.


• Verify that the system provides an automated SAN audit trail.


• Identify a product that's intuitive and simple to use. It will allow you to delegate some of the SAN operations from the highly skilled SAN architects.