Optimizing Cloud Storage Management Services

Abstract

Storage services are an essential part of an organization's IT infrastructure services and contribute a significant part of total IT costs. For this reason, various service management techniques are applied to optimize a service's storage resource usage while still addressing requirements related to performance, high availability, or disaster recovery. While storage virtualization has been the basis for many storage service management optimizations, the relatively stable environments of enterprise IT enabled all management activity to proceed in the context of change processes on specialized storage controllers. Completely virtualized environments require frequent topological changes but also enable optimized resource usage across shared resource pools. This enables lower resource and service management costs if the right storage service management architecture is deployed. This chapter focuses on cloud service management from a storage perspective, providing a set of proven methods and services to optimize storage resource usage and the management architecture that enables them.