By Jack Hughes, Storage Automation Product Manager

For what seems like years, the trades have been touting storage automation as the next big thing to improve data center efficiency. No doubt, there is vast potential for automation to help streamline SAN and NAS management. Storage provisioning, back-up, capacity reclamation and configuration management are a few examples of storage services typically requiring lots of repetitive, time consuming manual processes.  So why are enterprise organizations, even those who have made the leap into server and network automation, reluctant to bring automation to storage operations?

Perhaps the answer lies in the history and culture of storage administration which has been somewhat shrouded in secrecy and segregated from the rest of the IT community by security measures. Whatever the reason, storage administrators often substitute home-grown scripts for true automation, relegating themselves to endless updates in order to stay current with the ever changing storage infrastructure.

This set-up worked just fine over the years until the disruptive force of virtualization changed everything. The virtualization revolution forced most organizations to re-think the way they’re doing business, and SAN and NAS management is no exception.

What we’re hearing now from customers is that the virtual revolution and its indisputable benefits also comes with a dark side manifesting itself in VM sprawl, over-provisioned storage, and underutilized capacity leading to application performance bottlenecks. Data center and NOC managers are concluding that the old ways of managing storage are no longer viable. Transparency of information about the storage infrastructure including capacity utilization, compliance, and performance is a must. In addition, more and more organizations are considering adding storage to self-service portals to more effectively meet the demands of growing and constantly changing virtual host infrastructure.

The virtualization revolution has provided the impetus to finally make storage automation essential for successful enterprise IT management. But to effectively meet the challenge, you need the right tools. HP Business Service Automation (BSA) is a good place to start. HP Operations Orchestration (OO) is the industry leader in run book automation and is tightly integrated with HP Storage Essentials. Together, these tools provide out-of-the box storage automation flows for rapid deployment of a variety of storage services. In addition, custom flows are easily created with the OO Studio using a simple drag, drop, and wire interface to quickly automate storage services and routines.

In upcoming editions of this blog I’ll talk more about specific use cases for automating storage services, but in the mean time I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject of storage automation and its relevance in today’s virtual data centers.

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