IBM SmartCloud Storage Access use cases
This chapter describes several use cases where an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud solution has improved aspects of a system, such as ease of use, administrator resource usage reduction, and automation. The use cases described in this chapter include some architecture deployment diagrams and configuration models that can be used as references for deploying the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution.
The use cases include some industry-based scenarios, such as a storage cloud for university file share solution, and an information technology (IT) services organization adopting an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud solution for meeting user demands.
The use cases also address some of the common requirements for the enterprises to decide to use an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access model. These common requirements match typical characteristics of any cloud-based solution:
•Administrator resource usage reduction
•Enhancing the pace of response and resolution for resource requests
•Adherence to policy-based workflow without compromising the automation
3.1 University cloud storage services
This section describes a university’s real-time IBM SmartCloud Storage Access adoption story.
3.1.1 Client background
The following list includes some vital information regarding the client background:
Category Education industry.
Adopter University.
Deployed solution IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage-based file space provisioning solution.
Number of users More than 20,000.
User management model
Departmental model with 16 departments.
Relevant information
 – Microsoft Active Directory (AD) was used as the authentication and user management system.
 – There was a central IT department.
 – Each department had many disciplines, and each discipline had workgroups.
 – Each department had an IT administrator.
 – The central IT department was interfacing with16 departments.
 – The users were spread across two campuses.
3.1.2 Business driver
The business driver was to create an automated and efficient workflow management system for storage resource requests, and therefore reduce the workload on the central IT team.
3.1.3 The IT environment assessment
The following list describes the highlights from the environment assessment drive:
•The university chose a network-attached storage (NAS)-based main storage solution to give easy access methods to the users (teaching staff and students).
•IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage systems chosen at two campuses met the growing requirements from the users.
IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage boxes deployed were well within the limits to meet the estimate of 1500 shares to be used by 10,000-20,000 users across two campuses.
•The request handling process was manual and cumbersome.
•The process flow included the following steps:
 – The users requesting shares initiated emails to the central IT department.
 – The central IT department had to validate the requests and seek necessary approvals.
 – The central IT administrator had to create these shares manually, and therefore the process was person-dependent.
 – Average turnaround time to process a request was high, and needed manual intervention at every step.
•Overall there was a requirement for a simplified request process, better management of the entire infrastructure, and effective monitoring of storage resources.
3.1.4 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access features match the client requirements
IBM proposed a solution with IBM SmartCloud Storage Access to meet the requirements and overcome pitfalls of the request handling process.
Table 3-1 shows the requirements versus proposed solutions matrix.
Table 3-1 University requirements versus solution matrix
Requested functionality
Matching IBM SmartCloud Storage Access feature
Request process simplification.
Self-service portal.
Approval process management.
Approval workflow management.
Department-wide resource allocation and workflow.
Departmental model.
Automated resource allocation.
Automated share creation on request approval.
Central resource reservation at customized service levels.
Resource pools through storage environments and service levels.
Migration of existing shares to an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based solution.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access configuration migration (contact IBM Lab Services support if such a feature is required).
Monitoring.
IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center working with IBM SmartCloud Storage Access.
3.1.5 Solution description
The IBM proposal of an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution met the storage cloud management requirements of the client:
•IBM SmartCloud Storage Access provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) for the users.
•A cloud administrator can set up the storage cloud environments, monitor the usage of cloud storage capacities, and process resource allocation requests.
•A user can also request for a new storage share, or modify properties of existing shares.
•If the administrator approves the user's request, the file set creation or modification on IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage can be processed automatically by IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.
This solution will greatly reduce the workload for cloud administrators, and provide a more formal but easy approach to manage the whole storage cloud environment.
Figure 3-1 shows the solution architecture.
Figure 3-1 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access usage reference
In this case, two customized service levels are defined on Tivoli Storage Productivity Center and IBM SmartCloud Storage Access. However, only a single service level was applied on each IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage, and the two service levels were used only to distinguish different IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage subsystems in IBM SmartCloud Storage Access.
The cloud administrator must select the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage when allocating storage resources, because different users or departments will access the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage at their own campus. Therefore, there are two service classes defined in Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. The service classes were created to include all of the file systems from a specific campus. When the user applies for storage resources, a requisite service class is selected to get resources from a particular campus.
Figure 3-2 shows a typical configuration for this environment.
Figure 3-2 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center entities configuration for university storage cloud
The following user roles are defined in this IBM SmartCloud Storage Access cloud environment:
Cloud administrators This role includes the employees from the university IT department. The cloud administrators have the highest privileges, including the storage environment configurations, cloud policy settings, user management, and overall resource monitoring.
Environment owners This role includes the IT administrators of each department. A storage environment is created for each department. These users can approve requests for their own departmental environments, and monitor their environment usage.
Users This role includes the leaders of institutions and workgroups. These users can apply for new storage shares, or apply to modify the existing shares assigned to them. The environment owners or cloud administrators can process their requests.
These users must hold accounts defined in the AD server, and their accounts should be imported into IBM SmartCloud Storage Access.
All other teachers or students can also access the shares, and can be granted the access privilege if their AD accounts are imported into IBM SmartCloud Storage Access.
The following steps briefly describe how the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution works:
1. The IBM SmartCloud Storage Access administrator (the default administrator account for IBM SmartCloud Storage Access) imports selected users from the AD server, and assigns some users in the university IT department as cloud administrators.
2. The cloud administrators define storage classes, and create storage environments for each department. They also assign the department's IT administrators as environment owners for each storage environment.
3. Users apply to create new shares or change the existing shares on IBM SmartCloud Storage Access. New requests will be generated.
4. Storage environment owners approve or reject the new requests. New shares are created if the requests are approved. The shares belong to the requester. They can also be assigned to other users who cannot access IBM SmartCloud Storage Access but have accounts on the AD server.
5. Environment owners monitor the usage of their storage environments.
6. Cloud administrators monitor the usage of the whole storage cloud.
3.1.6 Solution benefits
The IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution provides the following benefits to the client:
Automation and workload reduction
Storage shares can be created or altered automatically by IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. The client's IT administrators do not have to maintain the storage shares on IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage manually, which greatly reduces their workload.
Department model and effective resource management
With IBM SmartCloud Storage Access, the university IT administrators can delegate the department IT administrators to manage their own storage resources, which makes the responsibility clearer and the management more effective.
Process standardization and simplification
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access provides the mechanism to process storage cloud resource requests, which standardizes and simplifies the resource provision procedure.
3.2 IT Services adopting IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud
This section describes the proposed solution for an IT service organization.
3.2.1 Client background
The following list includes some vital information regarding the client background and the IT infrastructure that was already in place:
Category IT service industry.
Adopter IT services wing servicing a particular client. The services provided include network, servers, storage, an IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager-based Cloud service, and so on.
Storage infrastructure
One petabyte (PB) of storage that included block storage devices, such as IBM XIV, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (a virtualization system for 3rd party storages, such as EMC, Hitachi, and so on), IBM Storwize V7000 Unified, and IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage.
Number of users More than 6000.
User management model
Test and development teams of the client.
Relevant information
 – IBM Tivoli Directory Server was used as the authentication and user management system.
 – The IT environment includes a huge number of IBM System p®, IBM System x®, and VMWare ESX servers.
 – The IT environment already had existing storage area network (SAN) backbones with CISCO and Brocade SAN switches and directors serving more than 5000 servers, including the virtual servers.
 – The users were using a private cloud service from the same IT services providers, and this service was based on Tivoli Service Automation Manager. The storage capacity requested for this private cloud environment was the highest. The storage provisioning was a manual process, and there was no storage cloud solution deployed.
 – The client had three data centers across three cities, and the users were distributed across these locations.
 – There were centralized teams that supported Tivoli Service Automation Manager-based cloud services, platform management services, software engineering services, operating system management, and application management.
 – These centralized teams act as the user focal points for requesting storage resources for their servers.
 – Apart from the central service teams, there were a few departments that had their own server infrastructure, and that were dependent on the storage services from the main storage services team.
 – The storage resources were already monitored through IBM Tivoli Productivity Center.
 – There was a service request management system in place.
 – The storage services given included file and block services, and were supported by a small team of four people.
3.2.2 Business drivers
The average number of requests for storage resources was increasing, in addition to the pressure to manage the growing IT infrastructure. The client had already taken steps to invest in automation-based solutions, such as the Tivoli Service Automation Manager-based cloud resource provisioning, and was looking for a similar storage model.
3.2.3 The IT environment assessment
The following list describes the highlights from the environment assessment drive:
•The storage resources requested per year experienced a 100% capacity growth.
•The service requests handled by the storage services team were doubling every year.
•The storage services team had to manage services that included installing storage devices, provisioning resources, and troubleshooting. With a team of four people, the service request management was getting cumbersome.
•More than 50% of the requests per year are about storage allocation.
•The existing service request management system did not include approval workflow management. The approval management was manual, and was dependent on emails.
•The reclaiming resources and expiration of storage resources were more manual processes. These processes were dependent on the resource user.
•The metering and chargeback were cumbersome, because they involved manual processes for report collection, validation, and estimation.
•There were predefined service levels set for each team or department with standard approval authority.
3.2.4 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access features match client requirements
IBM proposed a solution with IBM SmartCloud Storage Access to meet the requirements, and remove the pitfalls of the method used by the client.
Table 3-2 on page 43 shows the requirements versus proposed solution matrix.
Table 3-2 IT Services wing requirements versus solution matrix
Requested Functionality
Matching IBM SmartCloud Storage Access feature
Request process simplification.
Self-service portal.
Approval process management.
Approval workflow management.
Department-wide resource allocation and workflow.
Departmental model.
Automated resource allocation and workload reduction.
Automated share creation on request approval.
Central resource reservation at customized service levels.
Resource pools through storage environments and service levels.
Metering.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based metering.
Alignment to existing policies.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access policy management.
Driving resource expiration with warnings.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access expiration settings during the request.
Reduction in resource allocation turnaround times.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access resource allocation automation in integration with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.
3.2.5 Solution description
The storage environment was made for the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud solution. Though there were diverse components, such as storage systems from different vendors, the client had prerequisites already in place for an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution implementation. The only missing piece was the chargeback automation, for which the IBM SmartCloud Cost Management was proposed.
Figure 3-3 shows the high-level IT environment.
Figure 3-3 IT Services client environment
Figure 3-4 shows a high-level implementation of different entities on IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for a particular data center and its users.
Figure 3-4 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center entities configuration example for a data center
A high-available, LDAP-based authentication system was already in place, to which IBM SmartCloud Storage Access integration was proposed. For the data center example shown in Figure 3-4, there were predefined policies, such as the Software Engineering Services (SWES) department needs all of its storage resources from solid-state drive (SSD) and near-line serial-attached SCSI (NL SAS) drives on Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) 10.
Such policies were realized to an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access policy model easily. The client was already in a departmental model with specific departments and managers. These managers were the department administrators, and the main storage team took the responsibility of the cloud storage administrator. By deploying IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud for the client, there were significant benefits overcoming the pit falls of the resource request system that they had in place.
3.2.6 Solution benefits
The following list includes the benefits of the proposed solution:
Automation and reduction of required administrator resources
With automation, the reduction of required administrator resources is the biggest factor. With IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based solution in place, the rapid growth in the storage capacity can be managed effectively by the storage administrators.
Automated metering
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-provided reports are a boon for the storage department, because they take away the manual report collection, estimation, and validation process before the chargeback.
Turnaround time reduction for resource allocations
The users were satisfied with rapid turnaround times. The turnaround times for resource provisioning were reduced from a few days to a few hours.
Expiration and reclaiming the resources
The storage team was relieved from manual validation and expiration, because IBM SmartCloud Storage Access has an automated expiration based on policy selection.
Process simplification
The overall resource provisioning process was simplified. With the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access self-service portal, users only had to click a few times rather than entering a large amount of information about the call service management system. The approval and resource creation policy was fully automated, and removed the manual intervention pitfalls of the earlier call service management process.
Effective monitoring on usage of resources
Because the resource expiration is automatic, and is supported with an able metering and chargeback system, the efficiency in reclaiming resources and monitoring resource usage was increased.
3.3 Healthcare and health insurance adopting storage cloud
The section explains how healthcare and health insurance companies adopted an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based private storage cloud for their collaboration.
3.3.1 Client background
The following list includes some vital information regarding the client’s IT infrastructure and process background:
Category Healthcare and health insurance industry.
Adopter Healthcare organization and health insurance provider.
Relevant information
 – The healthcare organization and health insurance provider worked together to provide health insurance for their customers.
 – The healthcare organization had an IT infrastructure independent from that of the healthcare provider.
 – The healthcare organization was using IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage with Microsoft AD authentication.
 – The health insurance provider was using an IBM Storwize V7000 Unified with a Microsoft AD service.
 – The AD of the healthcare organization and the AD of the insurance provider had a trusted relationship.
 – The patient medical records were kept in the healthcare organization’s IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage box. The doctors and technicians uploaded the records of patients into the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage share.
 – There was an IT department in the healthcare organization managing the IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage, along with Microsoft AD.
 – The health insurance provider received emails of the health records from the healthcare organization. The health insurance provider stored all of these records in the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified.
 – There was an IT department managing the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified and Microsoft AD server that the insurance provider had.
 – The healthcare organization received emails of the health insurance details of patients from the healthcare organization. The healthcare organization stored all of these records in IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage.
 – The IT department of both of the organizations were using their mailing system for requesting storage resources and privileges.
 – The number or records per patient and the number of patients grew daily. This was translated into the number of share creations.
3.3.2 Business drivers
Both of the organizations in this scenario had a common business driver to simplify the storage request process, automate the resource provisioning, and use minimal hardware resources that they can own in common to achieve this.
3.3.3 The IT environment assessment
The following list includes some of the highlights from the IT environment assessment drive:
•Both of the organizations were ready to share the necessary records as read-only with each other.
•The healthcare organization was ready to allow the insurance provider to create shares on its IT infrastructure and vice versa to avoid the email traffic.
•Both of the organizations’ networks were interconnected.
•The share creation process followed was a manual process, and the number of share creation requests has doubled every quarter.
•Both of the organizations had 6000 staff members in total, all of whom had privileges to access the file share.
•The number of patients who were using both healthcare services and health insurance was close to 15,000.
•The organizations were concerned about adding hardware in their IT departments, and they wanted minimal footprints of hardware and software to meet their automation needs.
•The organizations were ready to share a common solution setup without compromising on the data access aspects.
•The IT department of both of the organizations could only manage to have three people for infrastructure management and services.
•The whole process was cumbersome and people-dependent.
•The health insurance provider wanted an approval cycle for the share creation by the healthcare organization, with the local IT manager being the approving authority.
•The healthcare organization wanted an approval cycle for the share creation by the health insurance provider, with the local IT manager being the approving authority.
3.3.4 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access features match client requirements
IBM proposed an IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-based storage cloud solution to meet all of the requirements of both the healthcare organization and the health insurance provider.
Table 3-3 shows the requirements versus proposed solution matrix.
Table 3-3 Healthcare and health insurance requirements versus functions matrix
Requested Functionality
Matching IBM SmartCloud Storage Access Feature
Mutual access of storage infrastructure for the share creation, and common infrastructure to host the solution.
Federated authentication.
Request process simplification and approval flow.
Self-service portal and IBM SmartCloud Storage Access approval flow.
Organization-wide resource allocation and workflow.
Departmental model.
Automated resource allocation and workload reduction.
Automated share creation on request approval.
Alignment to existing policies.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access policy management.
Reduction in resource allocation turnaround times, and reduction in administrator resources required.
IBM SmartCloud Storage Access resource allocation automation in integration with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.
3.3.5 Solution description
The biggest benefit for both of the organizations is the use of the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access-supported storage system and authentication systems. The proposal was to put up a common IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution setup with one of the new functions of IBM SmartCloud Storage Access called federated authentication.
Federated authentication enables users from different organizations to request storage resources from a cloud-like storage infrastructure. With this, the healthcare organization’s storage users can access the common IBM SmartCloud Storage Access portal to create shares on the health insurance provider’s storage infrastructure, and vice-versa.
Figure 3-5 shows the deployment model for the solution.
Figure 3-5 Healthcare and health insurance IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution deployment
Figure 3-6 on page 49 shows a typical Tivoli Storage Productivity Center and IBM SmartCloud Storage Access configuration to meet the requirements.
Figure 3-6 IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center entities configuration for healthcare and health insurance provider
In this case, the environments HC_Remote_Write and Ins_Remote_Write were set with approval cycles.
3.3.6 Solution benefits
The following list describes the benefits of the proposed solution:
Automation and reduction of required administrator resources
With automation in place, the required administrator resource reduction is the biggest factor. The small IT department that the organizations can afford can manage growth and accommodate all service requests.
Turn around time reduction for resource allocations
The users were satisfied with rapid turnaround times. The turnaround time for resource provisioning was reduced from a few days to a few hours.
Process simplification The overall resource provisioning process was simplified. With the IBM SmartCloud Storage Access self-service portal, the users only had to click a few times. The mail exchange traffic was reduced considerably. IBM SmartCloud Storage Access allowed a simpler process for the organizations to collaborate in an effective way.
..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset