iWave’s Storage Director has what the company calls an open and extendable architecture. At the base of the architecture, iWave abstracts the IT infrastructure, including the physical environment (such as servers, storage, and networking), the virtual environment (such as VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V) and what it calls ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) service support applications (such as service desk, event management systems, and change and configuration management).
On the next level up are storage workflows managed by the iWave Orchestrator, including storage provisioning, storage administration and storage (space) reclamation. The very top level is a service invocation that includes the iWave Storage Director itself, as well as the customer interface portal and all the middleware glue such as standard APIs, including Web services.
Is all this complex? Actually, yes. Take, for example, provisioning. Thin provisioning has been a boon in helping the provisioning process itself, but does not address all the workflow and management issues that are necessary for true provisioning. For true provisioning to occur, the request to provision has to be captured, security has to be configured, and the application that uses the storage has to be taken into account. Automating storage provisioning requires workflow and change management to be put in place.
In addition, enabling the ability to make changes if necessary should help alleviate an organization’s concerns about the of loss of control. For example, with policy-driven automated changes in place, there is always the chance that what you expected to happen actually doesn’t. Corrections need to be done. This is the job of storage remediation, which allows you to correct policies that are aren’t functioning as intended.
All in all, iWave automates an "end-to-end" approach to the storage process, meaning that everything from the host server (including the application), the operating system and, if used, the hypervisor to the fabric network switches to the storage controller and, finally, to the actual spindles on the disks are taken into account. This is necessary because the user experience (including performance, such as response time, and viability) in using storage depends upon all of these components. Storage automation then is not only about storage, but also about everything else that can affect the user and IT operations related to the storage experience.
