SRM (Storage Resource Management) initiatives began in earnest in the late 1990’s. This was a Unix, Windows and later a Linux market which held great promise 2-4 years ago but has faded in recent years. There were several reasons the 20+ SRM companies faded and lost momentum:
- SRM products had a hard time moving from a reactive, reporting tool to a proactive tool that could make decisions and take actions based on user-defined policies,
- SRM products were mainly homogeneous, thus failing to provide support for heterogeneous environments, and
- SRM products only dealt with disk space allocation and lacked any insight into disk performance issues. SRM users were worn down with all the alerts and decisions that they had to perform manually.
As a result, organizations eventually struggled to make a good business case for SRM acquisitions.
Action Item: Today’s reality is that organizations will need to integrate a variety of vendor and homegrown tools. Storage organizations must accept that the structure of storage is going to be split up by vendor and type of array and that organizationally, minimizing the number of vendors and storage pools is one way to reduce storage administration overheads.
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