MODULE 12-STORAGE

INFRASTRUCTURE
MANAGEMENT

PARTICIPANT GUIDE

PARTICIPANT GUIDE
Table of Contents

Module Objectives ............................................................................................................... 1

Storage Infrastructure Management......................................................................... 2

Overview .............................................................................................................................. 3
Key Characteristics of Modern Storage Infrastructure Management..................................... 4
Key Storage Management Functions ................................................................................... 6

Operations Management ........................................................................................... 7

Monitoring ............................................................................................................................ 8
Monitoring Parameters ......................................................................................................... 9
Alerts ................................................................................................................................. 14
Reporting ........................................................................................................................... 15
Operations Management Processes .................................................................................. 17

Knowledge Check .................................................................................................... 23

Knowledge Check .............................................................................................................. 24
Knowledge Check .............................................................................................................. 25
Knowledge Check .............................................................................................................. 26

Concepts in Practice................................................................................................ 27
Concepts in Practice .......................................................................................................... 28

Exercise - Storage Infrastructure Management ..................................................... 33

Exercise: Storage Infrastructure Management ................................................................... 34

Module 12-Storage Infrastructure Management - Appendix ................................ 36

Appendix: Monitoring Configuration ................................................................................... 37
Appendix: Monitoring Availability........................................................................................ 38
Appendix: Monitoring Capacity........................................................................................... 39
Appendix: Monitoring Performance .................................................................................... 40
Appendix: Monitoring Security............................................................................................ 41
Appendix: Configuration Management ............................................................................... 42

Module 12-Storage Infrastructure Management

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 Appendix: Change Management ........................................................................................ 43
Appendix: Capacity Management ...................................................................................... 44
Appendix: Availability Management ................................................................................... 45

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 Module Objectives

Module Objectives

The main objectives of the module are to:

→ Describe storage infrastructure management and its functions.

→ Describe monitoring and its parameters.
→ Explain various operations management processes.

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Storage Infrastructure Management

Storage Infrastructure Management

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 Storage Infrastructure Management

Overview

Dell Storage Resource Manager (SRM) console. (Click image to enlarge)

Storage infrastructure management ensures the proper and cost-effective use of

the available storage resources to meet the business needs.

• Helps IT organizations to achieve their strategic business goals and service

level requirements.
• Aligns the storage resources with the performance needs of the applications.
• Ensures better utilization of the existing storage resources to reduce
unnecessary infrastructure investments.

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Storage Infrastructure Management

Key Characteristics of Modern Storage Infrastructure

Management

Service-focused approach

Modern storage infrastructure management has a service-based focus. It is linked

to the service requirements and service level agreement (SLA)1. Examples include:

• Determining the optimal amount of storage space needed in a backup storage

system to meet the capacity requirements of a service.
• Creating a disaster recovery plan to meet the recovery time objective (RTO) of
services.
• Ensuring that the management processes, management tools, and staffing are
appropriate to provide a data archiving service.

Software-defined data center-aware

• Software-defined data center management is more efficient than hardware-

specific management.
• Many common, repeatable, hardware-specific management tasks are
automated. Management is focused on strategic, value-driven activities.
• Management functions move to an external software controller.
• Management operations become independent of the underlying hardware.

1An SLA is a formalized contract document that describes service level targets,
service support guarantees, service location, and the responsibilities of the service
provider and the user. These parameters of a service determine how the
components of the data protection environment will be managed.

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 Storage Infrastructure Management

End-to-end visibility

• Provides detailed information on configuration, connectivity, capacity,

performance, and interrelationships between components.
• Enables report consolidation, correlating issues to find root-cause, and tracking
migration of data and services.

Orchestrated operations

• SDDC controller/orchestrator programmatically integrates and sequences

component functions into workflows.
• Orchestrator triggers an appropriate workflow upon receiving a service
provisioning or management request.
• Orchestration reduces service provisioning time, risk of manual errors, and
administration costs.

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Storage Infrastructure Management

Key Storage Management Functions

Infrastructure Discovery

• Discovery provides visibility into each infrastructure component.

− Discovered information helps in monitoring and management.
• Discovery tools interact and collect information from components.
• Discovery is typically scheduled to occur periodically.

− May also be initiated by an administrator or triggered by an orchestrator.

Monitoring, Alerts and Reporting

• Monitoring provides visibility into the storage infrastructure and forms the basis
for performing management operations.
• Alerting provides information about events or impending threats or issues.
• Reporting involves gathering information from various components and
operations management processes.

Operations Management

• Operations management involves on-going management activities to maintain

the IT infrastructure and the deployed services.
• Ensures that the services and service levels are delivered as committed.
Operations management involves several management processes.
• Ideally, operations management should be automated to ensure operational
agility.
− Management tools are usually capable of automating many management
operations.
• Further, the automated operations of management tools can also be logically
integrated and sequenced through orchestration.

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 Operations Management

Operations Management

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Operations Management

Monitoring

Monitoring provides visibility into the storage information health and involves the
following activities:

• Tracks the performance and availability status of components and services.

• Measures the utilization and consumption of resources.
• Tracks environmental parameters such as heating, ventilating, and air-
conditioning (HVAC).
• Triggers alerts when thresholds are reached, security policies are violated, or
service performance deviates from the SLA.

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 Operations Management

Monitoring Parameters

Storage infrastructure is primarily monitored for:

Configuration

WWN 50:06:01:6F:08:60:1E:BD WWN 10:00:00:90:FA:18:OD:CF

Zone esx161_vnx_152_1

FC Switch

Compute Systems Storage Systems

Monitoring configuration changes. (Click image to enlarge)

• Involves tracking configuration changes and deployment of storage

infrastructure components and services.
• Detects configuration errors, non-compliance with configuration policies, and
unauthorized configuration changes.

To understand the configuration monitoring example, click here.

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Operations Management

Availability

No redundancy due to switch SW1

failure
H1

SW1

H2

SW2

Storage System
H3

Unavailable

Monitoring the availability of storage infrastructure components. (Click image to enlarge)

Monitoring availability of hardware components (for example, a port, an HBA, or a

storage controller) or software components (for example, a database instance, an
SDDC controller, or an orchestration software):

• Involves monitoring the errors generated by the infrastructure components.

• Identifies the failure of any component that may lead to data and service
unavailability or degraded performance.

To understand the availability monitoring example, click here.

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 Operations Management

Capacity

Notification: File System is

80% Full
File System Expanded
Notification: File System is
66% Full

Free
NAS Capacity NAS
Free
Capacity
Free
Free Capacity
Capacity

Used Used
Capaci Capaci
Used ty ty
Capaci
Used
ty
Capaci
ty
NAS File System NAS File System

NAS File NAS File NAS File NAS File

System System System System
LUNs LUNs
Time

Monitoring NAS file system capacity. (Click image to enlarge)

Inadequate capacity leads to degraded performance or even service unavailability.

Monitoring capacity:

• Involves examining the amount of infrastructure resources used and what is still
available. Examples would be the free space available on a file system or a
storage pool or, the numbers of ports available on a switch.
• Helps an administrator to ensure uninterrupted data availability by averting
outages before they occur.

To understand the monitoring capacity example, click here.

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Operations Management

Performance

H1

H2
SW1

H3

SW2
100 %
New
Compute Storage System
System Port Utilization %
Compute
Systems H1 + H2 + H3

Monitoring performance on iSCSI storage systems. (Click image to enlarge)

Performance monitoring tracks how efficiently different IT components and services

are performing and helps to identify bottlenecks. Performance monitoring:

• Measures and analyzes behavior in terms of the number of completed and

failed operations per hour, the amount of data backed up daily, or the I/O
throughput.
• Identifies whether the behavior of components and services meets the
acceptable performance levels.

To understand the performance monitoring example, click here.

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 Operations Management

Security

Workgroup 2 (WG2)

Warning: Attempted replication of

WG2 devices by WG1 user -
Access Denied

SW1

WG2

WG1

SW2

Storage System
Replication Command

Inaccessible

Workgroup 1 (WG1)

Monitoring security in a storage system. (Click image to enlarge)

Monitoring storage infrastructure for security includes tracking unauthorized access

and identifying any malicious configuration changes. For example, monitoring
tracks and reports the initial zoning configuration performed in an FC SAN and all
the subsequent changes. Monitoring security:

• Detects all operations and data movement that deviate from predefined security
policies.
• Detects unavailability of information and services to authorized users due to
security breach.

To understand the security monitoring example, click here.

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Operations Management

Alerts

An alert is a system-to-user notification that provides

information about events or impending threats or
issues. Alerting keeps administrators informed about
the status of various components and operations,
which can impact the availability of services and
require immediate administrative attention such as:

• Failure of power for storage drives, memory, switches, or availability zones.

• Storage pool reaching a capacity threshold.
• Replication operation breaching a protection policy.
• Soft media error on storage drives.

Type of Alert Description Example

Information • Provides useful information • Creation of zone or

VSAN
• Does not require
administrator intervention • Creation of a storage
pool

Warning • Requires administrative • File system is

attention becoming full
• Soft media errors

Fatal • Requires immediate • Orchestration failure

attention • Data migration failure

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 Operations Management

Reporting

Reporting on a storage infrastructure involves gathering information from various

components and operations management processes. The gathered information is
compiled to generate reports for trend analysis, capacity planning, configuration
changes, deduplication ratio, chargeback, performance, and security breaches.

1: Capacity planning reports contain current and historic information about the
utilization of storage, file systems, ports, etc.

2: Configuration and asset management reports include details about the allocation
of storage, local or remote replicas, network topology, and unprotected systems.
This report also lists all the equipment, with details, such as their purchase date,
license, lease status, and maintenance records.

3: The ability to measure storage resource consumption per business unit or user
group and charge them back accordingly.

To perform chargeback, the storage usage data is collected by a billing system that
generates chargeback report for each business unit or user group. The billing
system is responsible for accurate measurement of the number of units of storage
used and reports cost/charge for the consumed units.

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Operations Management

4: Performance reports provide current and historical information about the

performance of various IT components and operations including success rate,
failed backup and recovery operations, and compliance with agreed service levels.

5: Security breach reports provide details on the security violations, duration of

breach and its impact.

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 Operations Management

Operations Management Processes

Some of the main processes of operation management include:

Configuration Management

Configuration management is responsible for maintaining information about

configuration items (CIs). CIs include components such as:

Process
Services Hardware Software People SLAs
Document

The information about CIs include their attributes, used and available capacity,
history of issues, and inter-relationships.

For more information about configuration management, click here.

Change Management

Change Management standardizes

change-related procedures in a data
protection environment for prompt
handling of all changes with minimal
impact on data protection operations
and service quality.

Examples of changes include:

• Introduction of a new data

replication service.
• Replacing an archive storage
system.
• Expansion of a storage pool.

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Operations Management

• Upgrade of a backup application.

• Change in process or procedural documentation.

To learn more about change management, click here.

Capacity Management

Capacity Management ensures that

the data protection environment is
able to meet the required capacity
demands for protection operations
and services in a cost effective and
timely manner.

Examples of capacity management

activities include:

• Adding new nodes to a scale-out

NAS cluster or an OSD.
• Expanding a storage pool and
setting a utilization threshold.
• Forecasting the usage of storage
media.
• Removing unused resources from a service and reassigning those to another.

To learn more about capacity management, click here.

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 Operations Management

Performance Management

Performance management ensures

the optimal operational efficiency of
all infrastructure components so that
data protection operations and
services can meet or exceed the
required performance level.
Management tools also proactively
alert administrators about potential
performance issues and may
prescribe a course of action to
improve a situation.

Examples of performance
management activities include:

• Adjusting conflicting backup

schedules.
• Fine-tuning file system configuration.
• Adding new VMs or allocating more resources to the existing VMs.
• Adding new ISLs and aggregating links to eliminate bottlenecks.
• Adding new nodes to protection storage.
• Changing storage tiering and cache configuration.

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Operations Management

Availability Management

Availability Management ensures

that the availability requirements of
data protection operations and
services are consistently met.

Examples of availability management

activities include:

• Deploying redundant, fault-

tolerant, and hot-swappable
components.
• Implementing compute cluster,
VM live shadow copy, and multi-
pathing solutions.

To learn more about availability

management, click here.

Incident Management

Incident Management2 is responsible for detecting and recording all incidents in a

data protection environment. It investigates the incidents and provides appropriate
solutions to resolve them.

The following table illustrates an example of an incident that was detected by the
Incident Management tool:

2 An incident is an unplanned event such as a switch failure, security attack, or

replication software error that may cause an interruption to the protection
operations and services, or degrade their quality.

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 Operations Management

Sever Event Type Devi Priori Stat Last Updated Own Escalat
ity Summ ce ty us er ion
ary

Fatal Pool A Incid NAS None New 2021/03/07@12 - No

usage ent 1 :38:34
is 95%

Fatal Databa Incid DB High WIP 2021/03/07@10 L. Support

se 1 is ent serv :11:03 John Group 2
down er 1

Warni Port 3 Incid Switc Medi WIP 2021/03/07@09 P. Support

ng utilizati ent hA um :48:14 Kim Group 1
on is
85%

Problem Management

Problem management prevents

incidents that share common
symptoms or root causes from
reoccurring, and minimizes the
adverse impact of incidents that
cannot be prevented. Problem
management:

• Reviews incident history to detect

problems in a data protection
environment.
• Identifies the underlying root
cause that creates a problem.
• Uses integrated incident and
problem management tools to
mark specific incidents as problem and perform root cause analysis.

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Operations Management

• Provides the most appropriate solution or preventive remediation for problems.

• Analyzes and solves errors proactively before they become an
incident/problem.

Security Management

Security management prevents the

occurrence of security-related
incidents or activities. These
incidents adversely affect the
confidentiality, integrity, and
availability of organizations' data.
Security management ensures the
regulatory or compliance
requirements for data protection of
organizations are met for protecting
data at a reasonable cost. It
develops data security policies and
also deploys required security
architecture, processes,
mechanisms, and tools.

Examples of security management activities are:

• Managing user accounts and access policies that authorize users to use a
backup/replication service.
• Implementing controls at multiple levels (defense in depth) to access data and
services.
• Scanning applications and databases to identify vulnerabilities.
• Configuring zoning, LUN masking, and data encryption services.

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 Knowledge Check

Knowledge Check

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Knowledge Check

Knowledge Check

1. What information does infrastructure discovery identify? Select all that apply.
a. Configuration and connectivity
b. Capacity
c. Physical-to-virtual dependencies
d. Virtual-to-virtual dependencies

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 Knowledge Check

Knowledge Check

2. What is a purpose of a chargeback report?

a. Reports resource consumption per business unit
b. Reports charges for an SLA breach
c. Reports investments in managing infrastructure
d. Reports the cost of decommissioning infrastructure components

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Knowledge Check

Knowledge Check

3. Match the following management processes with their descriptions:

A. 4. Availability C B. Determines the optimal amount

management of resources required to meet the
needs of IT operations.

B. 2. Problem B A. Prevents incidents that share

management common symptoms or root causes
from reoccurring.

C. 1. Capacity D D. Makes a decision to approve or

management reject the request for creating a
new IT service.

D. 3. Change A C. Ensures that the fault tolerance

management requirements of IT services are
consistently met.

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 Concepts in Practice

Concepts in Practice

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Concepts in Practice

Concepts in Practice

VMware vRealize Suite

VMware vRealize® Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the

heterogeneous data center and hybrid cloud. It delivers and manages infrastructure
and applications to increase the business agility while maintaining IT control. It
provides the most comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds,
multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure.

vRealize suite capabilities:

• Intelligent operations management to proactively addresses health,

performance, and capacity management of IT services across heterogeneous
and hybrid cloud environments to improve IT service performance and
availability.
• Automated IT and IaaS automates the delivery and ongoing management of IT
infrastructure to reduce response time to requests for IT resources and to
improve the ongoing management of provisioned resources.
• DevOps-ready IT helps an organization build a cloud solution for development
teams that can deliver a complete application stack.

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 Concepts in Practice

VMWare vRealize Automation dashboard. (Click image to enlarge)

Dell OpenManage Enterprise

OpenManage Enterprise is a systems management and monitoring web application

delivered as a virtual appliance. It provides a comprehensive view of the Dell EMC
servers, storage, and network switches on the enterprise network.

With OpenManage Enterprise, a web-based one-to-many systems management

application, users can:

• Discover devices in a data center environment.

• View hardware inventory and monitor the health of devices.
• View and manage alerts received by the appliance and configure alert policies.
• Monitor and manage firmware/driver versions and updates.
• Manage configuration settings across devices using configuration templates.
• Detect and remediate configuration deviations across devices using
configuration baselines.

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Concepts in Practice

• Retrieve and monitor warranty information for devices.

• Create and manage OpenManage Enterprise users.

OpenManage Enterprise frontend. (Click image to enlarge)

Dell SRM

Storage Resource Manager (SRM) is a comprehensive monitoring and reporting

solution that helps IT visualize, analyze and optimize today's storage infrastructure
while providing a management framework that supports investments in on-
premises and cloud storage infrastructure. SRM:

• Combines storage capacity planning and chargeback reporting for Dell EMC
and multivendor storage environments.
• Supports end-to-end data path visualization for performance analysis and
workload balancing.
• Provides custom, multitenant, multi-site, dashboards, and reports.
• Helps in configuration change planning and compliance monitoring to validate
design best practices and the Dell EMC Support Matrix.
• Helps organizations optimize capacity and improve productivity to get the most
out of their investments in block, file, and object storage.

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 Concepts in Practice

Dell EMC storage resource manager (SRM) frontend. (Click image to enlarge)

Dell Service Assurance Suite

Dell Service Assurance Suite offers a combination of management tools including

server, client and, automatic tools, to perform IT operations in a software-defined
data center. Service assurance suite:

• Discovers infrastructure components and details information about each one,

including configuration and the inter-relationship among components.
• Detects and correlates events related to the availability, performance, and
configuration status of infrastructure components.
• Helps administrators to proactively resolve issues before they impact the
services levels.

Dell CloudIQ

CloudIQ is the cloud-based proactive monitoring and predictive analytics

application for the Dell EMC infrastructure product portfolio. It combines the human
intelligence of expert engineering and the machine intelligence of AI/ML to provide

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Concepts in Practice

organizations with the insight to more efficiently and proactively manage their IT
infrastructure to meet business demand.

The CloudIQ portal displays your Dell EMC infrastructure systems in one view to
simplify monitoring across your data center, edge and co-location sites as well as
data protection in public clouds. With CloudIQ, you can easily assure that critical
business workloads get the capacity and performance they need, spend less time
monitoring and troubleshooting infrastructure, and spend more time innovating and
focusing on projects that add new value to organizations.

In addition to monitoring APEX Data Storage Services, CloudIQ reaches beyond

on-premises data centers and edge locations to proactively monitor and
predictively analyze your public cloud data protection deployments.

CloudIQ dashboard. (Click image to enlarge)

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 Exercise - Storage Infrastructure Management

Exercise - Storage Infrastructure Management

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Exercise - Storage Infrastructure Management

Exercise: Storage Infrastructure Management

Scenario

An organization maintaining multiple data centers provides

data protection services to its customers. The details are as
follows:

• Protection services cover both the local site

as well as the remote site protection for disaster recovery.
• The enterprise allows all its customers' data
to be stored, protected, and accessed from worldwide
locations.
• It has virtualized compute, network, and storage components and has deployed
various backup, replication, and archiving solutions.

Challenges

• Difficulty in locating and resolving errors in infrastructure components and data

protection operations.
• Difficulty in allocating resources to meet dynamic resource consumption and
seasonal spikes in resource demand.
• Occasionally operational teams are unaware of degraded performance of
components.
• Difficulty in creating the inventory of various infrastructure components including
their configuration, connectivity, functions, and performance.

Requirements

• Need to ensure adequate availability of IT resources to provide data protection

services.
• Need to gather and maintain information about all the infrastructure components
in a centralized database.
• Administrators should get proactive alerts about potential performance issues
on data protection operations.

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 Exercise - Storage Infrastructure Management

Deliverables

• Propose a solution that will address the organization’s challenges and

requirements.

Solutions

• Implement a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring, alerting, reporting tool. This

could show the available unused capacity, and show the systems that are
impacted with performance due to overutilization. The tool could also alert
operational staffs when availability, performance, security, capacity is causing
concerns. This tool could also help in discovering new and existing components
and their configurations.

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Module 12-Storage Infrastructure Management -
Appendix

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Appendix: Monitoring Configuration

The image illustrates an example of configuration changes in the storage

infrastructure. In this example:

• The configuration changes are captured and reported by a monitoring tool in

real-time.
• A new zone is created to enable a compute system to access LUNs from one of
the storage systems.
• The changes are made on the FC switch (device).

The table lists configuration changes in the storage infrastructure.

Changed At Description Device Compliance

Breach

2021/01/07 @ The member 100000051E023364 No

13:34:23 10000090FA180DCF
has been added to
the zone
esx161_vnx_152_1

2021/01/07 @ The member 100000051E023364 No

13:34:23 5006016F08601EBD
has been added to
the zone
esx161_vnx_152_1

2021/01/07 @ A new zone 100000051E023364 No

13:34:23 esx161_vnx_152_1
has been added to
the fabric
100000051E023364

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Appendix: Monitoring Availability

The image illustrates an example of monitoring the availability of storage

infrastructure components, including:

• A storage infrastructure includes three compute systems (H1, H2, and H3) that
are running hypervisors.
• All the compute systems are configured with two FC HBAs, each connected to
the production storage system through two FC switches, SW1 and SW2. All the
compute systems share two storage ports on the storage system.
• Multipathing software has also been installed on each compute system's
hypervisor. If one of the switches, SW1 fails, the multipathing software initiates
a path failover, and all the compute systems continue to access data through
the other switch, SW2.
• Due to absence of a redundant switch, a second switch failure could result in
unavailability of the storage system. Monitoring for availability enables detecting
the switch failure and helps the administrator take corrective action before
another failure occurs. In most cases, the administrator receives symptom alerts
for a failing component and can initiate actions before the component fails.

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Appendix: Monitoring Capacity

The image illustrates the importance of monitoring the capacity of a storage pool in
a NAS system:

• If the file system is full and no space is available for applications to perform
write I/O, it may result in an application/service outage.
• Monitoring tools can be configured to issue a notification when thresholds are
reached on the file system capacity; for example:

− When the file system reaches 66 percent of its capacity, a warning message
is issued.
− A critical message is issued when the file system reaches 80 percent of its
capacity.
− This enables the administrator to take action by provisioning additional LUNs
and extending the NAS file system before it runs out of capacity.

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Appendix: Monitoring Performance

The image provides an example that illustrates the importance of monitoring

performance on iSCSI storage systems; in this example:

• Compute systems H1, H2, and H3 (with two iSCSI HBAs each) are connected
to the storage system through Ethernet switches SW1 and SW2.
• The three compute systems share the same storage ports on the storage
system to access LUNs.
• A new compute system running an application with a high work load must be
deployed to share the same storage port as H1, H2, and H3.
• Monitoring storage port utilization ensures that the new compute system does
not adversely affect the performance of the other compute systems.

Here, utilization of the shared backup storage system port is shown by the solid
and dotted lines in the graph. If the port utilization prior to deploying the new
compute system is close to 100 percent, then deploying the new compute system is
not recommended because it might impact the performance of the backup clients
running on other compute systems. However, if the utilization of the port prior to
deploying the new compute system is closer to the dotted line, then there is room to
add a new compute system.

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Appendix: Monitoring Security

The image illustrates the importance of monitoring security in a storage system. In

this example:

• The storage system is shared between two workgroups, WG1 and WG2.
• The data of WG1 should not be accessible by WG2 and vice versa.
• A user from WG1 might try to make a local replica of the data that belongs to
WG2.
• If this action is not monitored or recorded, it is difficult to track such a violation of
security protocols.
• Conversely, if this action is monitored, a warning message can be sent to
prompt a corrective action or at least enable discovery as part of regular
auditing operations.

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Appendix: Configuration Management

• Examples of a CI attribute are the CI’s name, manufacturer name, serial

number, license status, version, description of modification, location, and
inventory status (for example, on order, available, allocated, or retired). The
inter-relationships among CIs in a data center environment commonly include
service-to-user, virtual storage pool-to-service, virtual storage system-to-virtual
storage pool, physical storage system-to-virtual storage system, and data
center-to geographic location.
• All information about CIs is usually collected and stored by the discovery tools in
a single database or in multiple autonomous databases mapped into a
federated database called a configuration management system (CMS)3.
Discovery tools also update the CMS when new CIs are deployed or when
attributes of CIs change.

3 CMS provides a consolidated view of CI attributes and relationships, which is

used by other management processes for their operations. For example, CMS
helps the security management process to examine the deployment of a security
patch on VMs, the problem management to resolve a remote replication issue, or
the capacity management to identify the CIs affected on expansion of a virtual
storage pool.

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Appendix: Change Management

• Change management typically uses an orchestrated approval process that

helps making decision on changes in an agile manner. Through an
orchestration workflow, the change management receives and processes the
requests for changes.
• Changes that are at low risk, routine, and compliant to predefined change
policies go through the change management process only once to determine
that they can be exempted from change management review thereafter.

– These requests are typically treated as service requests and approved

automatically. All other changes are presented for review to the change
management team4.

4The change management team assesses the potential risks of the changes,
prioritizes, and makes a decision on the requested changes.

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Appendix: Capacity Management

• Capacity management determines the optimal amount of resources required to

meet the needs of protection operations and services regardless of dynamic
resource consumption and seasonal spikes in resource demand.
• Maximizes the utilization of available capacity and minimizes spare and
stranded capacity without compromising the service levels. S capacity
management team uses several methods to maximize the utilization of capacity
such as data deduplication, compression, and storage tiering.
• Capacity management tools are usually capable of gathering historical
information on the usage of backup/archiving servers and protection storage
over a period of time.

– Tools establish trends on capacity consumption and perform predictive

analysis of future demand.
– This analysis serves as input to the capacity planning activities and enables
the procurement and provisioning of additional capacity in the most cost
effective and least disruptive manner.

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Appendix: Availability Management

Availability management is responsible for establishing proper guidelines based on

the defined availability levels of data protection operations and services. The
guidelines include the procedures and technical features required to meet or
exceed both the current and the future data availability needs at a justifiable cost.
The availability management team:
• Identifies all availability-related issues in a data protection environment and
areas where availability must be improved.
• Monitors whether the availability of protection components and services is
maintained within acceptable and agreed levels.

The monitoring tools also help administrators to identify the gap between the
required availability and the achieved availability.
• The administrators can quickly identify errors or faults in the components that
may cause data unavailability in the future.
• Based on the data availability requirements and areas found for improvement,
the availability management team may propose and architect new data
protection and availability solutions or changes in the existing solutions.

For example, the availability management team may propose an NDMP backup
solution to support a data protection service or any critical business function that
requires high availability. The team may propose both component-level and site-
level redundancy. This is generally accomplished by deploying two or more network
adapters per backup component, multi-pathing software, and compute clustering.
The backup components must be connected to each other using redundant
switches and/or network. The switches must have built-in redundancy and hot-
swappable components. The VMs hosting backup applications must be protected
from hardware failure/unavailability through VM live shadow copy mechanisms. The
backup storage system should also have built-in redundancy for various
components and should support local and remote backup.

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