Insider Insights: z/Journal Interviews Storage Specialist Fred Moore

by Bill Carico
December 1, 2005

z/Journal: What is the most significant change you see coming to improve storage management, data protection, or storage security in the next few years?

Fred Moore: It’s hard to choose the most significant change, but the areas of CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and Commonality Factoring may offer the single greatest value. In the years ahead, we will challenge the 50-year legacy backup/recovery application with a new model that either eliminates the backup window or reduces it to a fraction of its current time, and at the same time will make recovery a thing of the past. Why recover data at all? Recovery means you need to move the data somewhere before you can use it. This takes time and stops the application. The CDP concept provides the potential to disrupt the ageless time-consuming backup/recovery model for one that enables negligible recovery times. Commonality Factoring has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of redundant data that is moved during the backup/recovery process. High availability of the IT function is critical for nearly every business now. Remember that backup is important, but recovery is everything.

z/Journal: The IT industry is pleading for mainframe-like storage management capabilities for non-mainframe systems. How far from reality is this request? Can it ever be achieved?

 

FM: Mainframe-like DFSMS capabilities for today’s typical IT environment that deploys multiple heterogeneous operating systems such as Unix, Linux, NetWare, Windows, and mainframes remain a pressing but distant goal. One of the biggest remaining issues for the highly effective DFSMS product suite and its comprehensive storage management capability is that it’s available only on mainframes and isn’t extensible to any other computing platforms. Savvy storage management vendors are expressing the growing need and significant business opportunity for an enterprisewide, policy-based storage management solution. This is increasingly important, since Unix and Windows (non-mainframe) systems now generate and account for more than 85 percent of the world’s stored digital data and clearly justify a legitimate, cross-platform storage management solution. Many non-mainframe businesses now demand the same level of mainframe-class storage management functionality they have counted on for more than 15 years. Today’s biggest storage management problems are centered in non-mainframe systems. A storage administrator on a mainframe manages, on average, well in excess of 40TBs of online storage while non-mainframe storage administrators manage just a few terabytes. The management costs are rapidly increasing and exceed hardware expense. The single requirement for a centralized, end-to-end storage management solution using a “single pane of glass” for mainframe and non-mainframe systems that really works across multiple operating systems couldn’t be greater.