Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: Fred Moore
The explosion in complexity and cost of storage over the past few years has caused storage administrators to wish almost wistfully for the type of management framework that they have seen adopted in the networking and other technology worlds: a framework that can comprehensively manage heterogeneous devices at any scale of operation.
The ideal storage management framework would provide rich discovery, reporting and proactive scheduling of storage resources without dramatically increasing (indeed, dramatically reducing) the labor necessary to achieve utilization, performance and environmental optimization ideals. Recently we have seen increased interest in storage resource management (SRM) as users continue to grapple with storage challenges and vendors refurbish marketing campaigns intended to wrap their product sets in a glow of technology integration that may or may not be justified.
However, we’ve been through the storage resource management adoption process once before with nearly no success. Under circumstances in which the infrastructure to be managed is relatively small, relatively homogeneous and features larger than usual numbers of administrators, introducing a stand-alone SRM product has shown some success. But under more normal circumstances, where storage switches, devices, fabrics, etc., are heterogeneous, administrative resources are very tight, and scaled operation is very large, the reality is that the SRM tools are uniformly incapable of bringing much relief for the storage administrator’s pain.
Unfortunately, we don’t see near-term market pressures dramatically altering the state of the SRM industry. Large vendors will continue to invest in innovation that attempts to extend any proprietary advantages they have in the storage world, and that includes investment in SRM. Additionally there is no clear evidence that providers of server operating systems (Windows, Unix, Linux) are willing to put forward clean, clear standards for storage formats and object forms.
Independent of leadership that intends to bridge rather than preserve storage technology differentiation, the storage resource onus falls to users. The first step they should take is to define the SRM framework they want in their organizations, emphasizing policies and processes, many of them labor intensive, that make the most business sense for how they configure, provision, move, report on, and ultimately retire storage assets. Using proven frameworks such as ITIL and CMMI will increase chances of success. With such definitions in place, users will be in a better situation to appropriately cobble together point tools and frameworks from the multiple storage providers they use to support their overall SRM objectives.
Action Item: Users should continue to evaluate storage resource management product sets if only to learn what constitutes a reasonable, comprehensive SRM approach in their business. They should adopt these frameworks not from a technology standpoint per se but more from a policies, processes and practices perspective to ensure they are in control of and capable of appropriately extending their storage resource management tooling over the next few years.
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