SAN Administrator Challenge: Optimizing Dynamic
Workloads
In addition to the host of problems associated with developing a well balanced, high-performance storage
system, SAN administrators face a number of challenges both in storage provisioning planning and in
managing workloads that are, by their nature, dynamic.
In planning for storage provisioning, SAN administrators have historically had to perform tedious, manual
processes for each server, application and volume. They had to determine the required capacity and
performance for each in a series of tedious and error prone iterations. They had to decide on the RAID type
and number of disks, as well.
The weak link in the storage provisioning process — an area of great ambiguity and increased likelihood of
error — is in the characterization of applications. Online applications, e-mail and database profiles tend to be
dynamic because they are so closely linked to individual users, they involve processes that are time sensitive
or they are tied closely to the volume of business an entity performs. As a result, IT storage administrators are
constantly playing catch-up as they try to understand what is already required of these applications and what
they will likely require in the future.
Applications do not constitute the only constantly shifting benchmark for storage provisioning, however;
workloads themselves are dynamic. They vary throughout the day, week, month or quarter, depending on
when the business day starts or finishes, the frequency of internal deadlines and the incidence of external
events that can be neither controlled nor predicted. An e-mail system with a large number of mailboxes will
obviously experience greater-than-normal stresses during working hours when traffic is heavy, for example.
Workloads vary not only by the day but also by the time at which different processes run, such as the loading of
databases, regular reporting and the running of backups. All of these can take needed storage offline, leaving
the remaining available storage under pressure to accommodate a greater load.
The dynamic workload makes it a constantly shifting target, which means that — even if a design is solid and
administrators have planned diligently and to the best of their ability, it still can take a number of permutations
before an optimized configuration is attainable. Therefore, the old architectures are failing due to their inability
to provide the flexibility required to efficiently optimize dynamic workloads.
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