How is the System Manager Managing the System?

So how has the System Administrator's role changed over the last few years, what is the System Administrator doing today and what will they be doing in the future? Well, that depends on whether the organisation is running VERITAS or not.

Before VERITAS Software
Even now storage management conjures up images of IT staff running themselves ragged. Let's say an IT manager has 2 admin staff running 55 servers and trying to manage 150 terabytes of data. They will be working silly hours, constantly fire fighting, working flat out and hoping that someone will invent the 9-day week.

The IT Manager already has difficulty motivating existing staff, especially as budgets are being cut, when what they really needs is at least 2 more heads with skills and in-depth knowledge in switches, SANs, arrays, tape drives, from an array of vendors: HDS, EMULEX, Brocade Sun, IBM, EMC.

Meanwhile IT staff are running around inserting tapes into this drive and that, trying to find the right tapes to use for the right set of data or clients. Tapes are then manually marked up and delivered off-site and a manual schedule is used to determine which tapes are brought back on site, which are for disposal and which are to be kept.

With these old manual systems, storage management is fraught with error, and inevitably costly and labour intensive. At the same time, the amount of data the IT Manager is trying to manage is growing exponentially: with no help on the horizon, how is he going to keep the whole process of data management under control?

Predictably, tapes are lost or mislaid, and often organisations are put in jeopardy through these errors. They have servers with direct attached storage but have no idea either of capacity or utilisation.

As far as the IT Manager is concerned as long has the whole thing doesn't collapse around his ears, that's good enough, and if, at a guess, he thinks that a server is at full capacity the only answer is to throw more direct attached storage at it by using the reduced amount of budget he does have which simply makes the situation worse. He's not just losing sleep but a good deal of hair.

So, storage management has become a costly and unwieldy process, which has left other areas of a business vulnerable simply because of the lack of resources available. So what is the answer?

After VERITAS Software
VERITAS solutions provide an infrastructure that helps prevent these problems; solutions that will reduce hardware spend, manage storage utilisation and allocation, enable capacity planning and manage data storage instead of constantly fire fighting.

VERITAS SRM solutions optimise storage resource utilisation, simplify administration of heterogeneous environments, and provide for continuous availability of mission-critical applications. VERITAS software leads the market in providing highly interoperable, solutions that work seamlessly across the entire data centre (applications, databases, servers, and storage devices), helping organisations gain control of complexity.

VERITAS Software helps IT System administration from service level, to data analysis, to physical device control, helping IT departments to reduce the complexity of managing a storage network environment, reclaim wasted disk space from non-business critical files and to ultimately transform the IT operation from a cost centre to value centre.

Today's IT Managers have no time to send their staff on much needed training. How would it be if VERITAS could offer them the time and the budget to ensure the whole environment is controlled: time to ensure staff are trained, motivated and can see their families once in a while?

For example, VERITAS Netbackup offers vaulting. Vault simplifies the process of rotation and retention schedules for off-site copies of tapes by automating the process. The Vault option fully integrates with the NetBackup job scheduler and provides a Graphical User Interface. Tapes are now automatically marked and stored with an automatic schedule for the removal and return of tapes on and off site. The automation of this process frees up time for system admin and ensures mistakes are not made.

VERITAS solutions can also manage volumes across platforms and with interfaces like SANPoint Control, administrators no longer have to rely heavily on training courses for EMC, HDS, Sun, Microsoft, EMULEX, and Brocade. The environment is viewed from one place. A single training course on SANPoint Control gives the Administrator all the skills they need to manage the entire environment.

With VERITAS's storage management solutions, tools like: Storage Reporter, StorageCentral, CommandCentral Service, Volume Manager, Foundation Suite, File System, Data LifeCycle Manager and SANPoint Control- System Administrators can see the total utilisation across a multi-platform environment, shifting the management of data away from fire fighting to: capacity planning, management reporting, predictive analysis and preventative hardware failure.

For instance, SANPoint Control continuously looks at the entire environment, so if a GBIC in a particular switch is degrading, when it reaches a certain threshold, a threshold that has been determined by the IT administrator or manager, SANPoint Control will notify the administrator. The administrator can then plan downtime, using dynamic multi-pathing with VERITAS Volume Manager, data is diverted from the switch so it can be replaced before if fails and causes an outage with no effect to the end user.

The consolidation of resources to deal with ever shrinking budgets has lead to the need for shared and often complex IT infrastructures that, in many large organizations, provide specific service levels to internal customers, by delivering resources from a centralised pool - in effect providing IT as a utility.

Within IT, storage is an area where hardware costs are high, operational issues are complex, and service levels are critical. VERITAS CommandCentral Service builds on top of the infrastructure and data management capabilities of VERITAS SANPoint Control and VERITAS Storage Reporter to provide the necessary layers of management - physical, logical, and business - to support customers' implementations of internal storage utilities.

CommandCentral Service allows IT departments to centrally manage delivery of storage services and quantify the results of storage expenditures by tracking IT effectiveness and providing complete business-level reporting of storage resource utilisation, costs, and service level delivery, as well as enabling business customers to ensure that their storage performance and availability requirements are met at the lowest cost.

How is the Administrator's Role Going to Change?
In the next few years the role of Systems Administrators will change considerably. They will no longer need to be jack-of-all-trades specialising in every operating system and every hardware device from every vendor. The role is to shift from administration to data management.

Instead of constantly fire-fighting time is now available to undertake key strategic activities including the evaluation of new technologies and the implementation of business systems. By proactively managing the data across the environment, reporting on capacity planning, using predictive analysis tools and ensuring preventative action they will become a positive management resource rather than a necessary evil.

Education and Training is, therefore, a big issue. Never has the need for training been greater: but with no time to allow staff away from the job and no budgets available for training anyway, never has it been more difficult to facilitate. With a fully integrated VERITAS Solution, part of the cost savings made can be reallocated to training and proactive technical services. Administrators will need to gain skills in new areas to be able to effect the transition between roles.

VERITAS Education can enable IT staff to make the transition between System Administrator and Data Manager, help organisations fully utilise resources and achieve maximum return on investment. VERITAS Education offers courses across storage management solutions.

Staff who have primary responsibility for storage management can take courses in data protection, storage virtualisation: volume management and file systems, high availability: clustering and replication, storage area networking: fibre channel, SAN management and application management, helping IT Managers to reduce capital expenditure by decreasing operating costs and increasing productivity, reducing technical infrastructure costs, increasing the effectiveness and retention of IT staff and increasing technological competitiveness by improving effective access to business critical information.

Once the solution is in place, and time and money has been allocated to ensure the correct level of training is given, the administrator's children will start to recognise them again and the IT Manager can get their hair back.