BRAHMA: Planning Tool for Providing Storage Management as a Service

Storage management is becoming the largest component in the overall cost of storage ownership. Most organizations are trying to either consolidate their storage management operations or outsource them to a storage service provider (SSP) in order to contain the management costs. Currently, there do not exist any planning tools that help the clients and the SSPs in figuring out the best outsourcing option. In this paper we present a planning tool, Brahma, that specifically addresses the above mentioned problem, as Brahma is capable of providing solutions where the management tasks are split between the client and SSP at a finer granularity. Our tool is unique because: (a) in addition to hardware/software resources, it also takes human skill set as an input; (b) it takes planning time window as input because plans that are optimal for a given time period (e.g. a month) might not necessarily be the most optimum for a different time period (e.g. a year); (c) it can be used separately by both the client and the SSP to do their respective planning; (d) it allows the client and the SSP to propose alternative solutions if certain input service level agreements can be relaxed. We have implemented BRAHMA, and our experiment results show that there definitely are cost benefits that one can attain by having a tool with the above mentioned functional properties.