The Assessment of SRM by the Wikibon community (see The SRM leadership vacuum and Managing the resources for storage resource management) is stark. The picture is comprised of a patchwork of products, high implementation costs (leading to poor ROI) and spotty vendor investment all sounding a death knell for full-fledged heterogeneous SRM. Why has SRM failed in open systems where it has worked well for mainframes, other proprietary systems and networking? In a nutshell, lack of standardization. There are no accepted standards for discovery and limited coherent system information on storage usage and performance. Further, there is little capability to tie users to applications to the storage resources consumed. Attempts to build a repository of data have been fraught with high costs and unreliable data -- not a stable platform on which to build automation.
This leaves two strategic choices for storage management:
- Implement point products (e.g., Onaro for change management) and specific technologies (e.g., storage virtualization) to address high priority problem areas (e.g., performance, provisioning, migration or application dependency) and apply these across heterogeneous storage pools. This strategy requires tying point tools together loosely with strong policies and procedures that are followed;
- Create homogeneous storage islands and use the incumbent storage vendor's tools and technologies within those islands to maximize automation.
Neither strategy delivers one set of common tools across the data center. Both strategies have some degree of vendor lock-in. Both approaches will rely on strong procedures, homegrown software and scripts to integrate different storage management software. As a result, an emphasis on training, education and the use of proven frameworks such as CMMI and ITIL are crucial to success.
Action Item: With SRM, reach for the moon and not the stars. Storage management should focus on a small number of best-of-breed storage technologies and take pragmatic steps to tie them together with strong procedures.
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