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Can Storage Resource Management Save Us From Ourselves? We Quiz 9 SRM Vendors To Find Out.: Page 3 of 4

DOES VIRTUALIZATION HELP OR HURT SRM?
Despite still-modest levels of VM adoption, a consistent trend in most vendor questionnaires involves the need to deploy SRM to support virtual machine environments from Microsoft, Virtual Iron, VMware, and others. In fact, Network Appliance's chief marketing officer, Jay Kid, puts "support for VM consolidation" on his list of top selection criteria.When we dug deeper into why claims about support for VMware, Hyper-V, or SAN virtualization figured so prominently in responses, the consensus was that virtualization neither helps nor hurts the efficacy of SRM; it all comes down to whether the virtual server or storage architecture was designed and rolled out with management in mind. Of course, storage vendors also are eager to take advantage of the increasing interest in virtualization by showing how their offerings can add value to virtual platforms.

"Competitive 2008 SRM tools will need to discover, report, and map storage resources that are attached to a virtual host," says HP's Snyder. Most vendors expect steadily increasing deployment of server virtualization, meaning better-than-even odds they'll run into storage attached to a number of physical hosts under virtual machine management. Lack of VM support, Snyder says, will make accurate capacity and utilization reporting impossible and produce topology maps that don't properly stitch VM hosts to their associated storage resources. This complicates provisioning, performance management, troubleshooting, and more.

The vendors are split over the impact of virtualization on SRM efficacy, with CA's Coulter arguing that storage virtualization, at least, is making storage management more complex and difficult without adding value. In fact, the return on investment expected from server virtualization may actually be compromised by the lack of storage resource management, according to Tek-Tools' Barth. "Studies have shown that the majority of companies that virtualize their servers are actually seeing an increase in the growth of their storage spending due to a lack of visibility into their storage environments," he says. Without SRM, virtualizing servers "is like driving with blindfolds on."

Sean Derrington, Symantec's director of storage and availability management, agrees, adding that virtualization complicates storage management by introducing a layer of abstraction that reduces visibility from the application to the spindle. It's incumbent on SRM vendors to map VMs to the hypervisor and provide application-to-spindle visibility. Virtual logical unit numbers also present management challenges that SRM products must address.

Jamie Clifton, BridgeHead Software's director of business development, takes a slightly offbeat view of the benefits of SRM in the virtual world: That virtualization helps companies keep legacy gear in play longer and, with the help of SRM, lets new applications use older devices and storage methodologies. SRM is a prerequisite, from his perspective, to obtaining real value from virtualization.

Northern Software CEO Thomas Vernersson agrees about the potential benefits accrued to virtualization and the additional layer of flexibility it provides within storage architecture design. Done properly, he argues, virtualization allows the storage infrastructure to be organized in a more logical way, in turn making SRM policies easier to design and deploy.

"HP no longer sees any major impediments for mapping heterogeneous storage infrastructure," says Snyder. "We're very satisfied with our progress."

Unfortunately, none of his colleagues who responded to our survey share his view that storage management nirvana has arrived, or will in the near future. The fact is, any vendor will promise soup-to-nuts storage management--if you buy only its brand of storage. For example, the tools HP uses for managing Compaq EVA storage are not portable to managing the storage it rebrands from others, such as Hitachi Data Systems. Similarly, EMC's ECC SRM tools work well with some of its product lines--DMX, for example--but not as well with Clariion. The idea of SRM is that it is an inclusive management approach, not an exclusive one. This is an area where standards from the SNIA's SMI-S effort were supposed to save us. However, while it has been adopted as an international standard, SMI-S hasn't delivered on unified storage management. The fault is not in the spec, says Olocity CEO Roger Reich, who worked on the management approach from its earliest days and now seeks to build a business around helping vendors and consumers deploy and use the technology. Rather, SMI-S is hobbled by implementation. "[SMI-S] interfaces need to be easier to deploy and need better quality and completeness," Reich says.

Without effective "providers" (the SMI-S component that's supposed to provide monitoring and configuration access to storage gear), the underlying infrastructure of SRM tools is a rat's nest of millions of lines of code that integrates another rat's nest of disparate vendor proprietary interfaces that have horrible reliability. Reich adds that conventional SRM interfaces have wildly differing degrees of function and usually render SRM software a net efficiency drag to an IT shop using multivendor configurations.

Reich's views are echoed by nearly all other respondents. John Foley, IBM's TotalStorage Productivity Center marketing manager, decries proprietary systems and the lack of APIs as a source of vendor lock-in--not that IBM is opening its APIs to the world.

The upshot: IT must insist that vendors provide in their SRM products streamlined mechanisms to collect information and interact with storage gear. Today, the best we can hope for is a kludge of "hooks" ranging from proprietary APIs to SNMP MIBs. Vendors remain reluctant to provide open management interfaces that might contribute to the commoditization of storage gear and facilitate replacement of Brand X's box with Brand Y's less expensive system.