After nearly a decade of startup investment, acquisitions, starts and stops, the promise of storage resource management (SRM) continues to fall short of expectations. Businesses continue to clamor for lower costs, better service, less complexity, transparent metrics, and more speed. Storage administration, for its part, would like to respond with better utilization, fewer storage administrators, predictable performance, facile change management and improved reporting across the storage infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the business case for SRM is not compelling due in a large part to the lack of comprehensive products that address the needs of heterogeneous storage management. Indeed, many users are turning to virtualization to address capacity management concerns, which in turn leads to demand for more SRM capabilities on the performance front. It is becoming increasingly clear that in the near-to-mid term, SRM is simply not the big answer to providing the business with better across-the-board storage service. Rather there will be many little answers that users will have to cobble together (with more labor than desired) to meet the reporting, change management and performance management needs of the organization.
Action Item: Comprehensive SRM is not on the critical path, even though it should be, because heterogeneous SRM is not achievable. Users should not default to SRM for better service; rather they should choose and implement best-of-breed function to solve specific problems and rely on their own sets of policies, practices and approaches to managing heterogeneous storage infrastructure.
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