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This Best Practices is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Company:

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA)

The world's largest institutional asset-management firm with $1.3 trillion in assets, based in Boston.

Challenge:

Automating a storage area network (SAN) change management process to effectively change and scale SANs at the pace of business.

SsgA has nearly doubled in size in the last three years. During that period, SSgA's storage network environment grew in size and complexity. The company's IT organization recognized the challenges and importance of providing reliability for SANs in order to support the business, deliver greater value to shareholders and bring greater return on clients' investments.

"We make extremely large block trades and stability in our storage is essential," said Robert Shinn, Principal at Boston-based SSgA. "We can't have applications down any longer than people can hold their breath."

Limitations in preventing and troubleshooting problems in SANs preclude IT organizations (including SSgA) from attaining high application availability - a priority for CIOs. Sixty to 80 percent of problems in SANs - including the most challenging to find and fix - result directly from SAN changes. Basic day-to-day actions cause SAN errors: Someone from the cabling group disconnects the wrong cable without your awareness. A member of the storage team makes a typing error when adding LUN masking for a new volume, but you only learn of the mistake after downtime occurs. A storage administrator is required to shut down a switch, but doesn't fully understand its impact on the SAN.

Organizations may have no choice but to manage changes and events in storage networks with dark-age methods - error-prone and time-consuming manual techniques and cumbersome spreadsheets. To validate the impact of a zone change, for example, the storage administrator must compare and correlate data from the HBA details spreadsheet, the zoning database and the storage masking spreadsheet. As a result, half of IT time has been spent managing changes and change-induced problems.

Adding more people is not an answer given the sheer complexity of managing and scaling SANs. A 100-server SAN requires maintenance of more than 20,000 actual access paths and 100,000 potential logical paths. To be successful, a storage manager must understand how a single change in such a SAN can affect several thousand paths. From this example, it becomes clear that humans cannot possibly understand the impact of changes throughout the maze of access paths, their relationships and inter-dependencies.

Solution:

Onaro, Inc.'s SANscreen Predictive Change Management software

Today, Onaro's SANscreen Predictive Change Management software is installed and running to protect many large SANs at Fortune 1000 companies. These companies have documented several events when application downtime

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