Insider: SRM Spells 'Challenge'

What IT manager today wouldn't welcome better control over the storage infrastructure? Sadly, few are able to make their wish a reality, according to the latest Byte and Switch Insider.

The report, Storage Resource Management: Barriers and Breakthroughs, analyzes the current and projected market for SRM from the perspective of what users want from SRM wares, what challenges they face, what issues they must resolve to implement SRM, and who the suppliers are.

Storage managers crave the simplicity and savings provided by SRM tools that help with data collection, correlation, analysis, and automation of storage-related data and tasks. However, many don't have the time and money required to implement SRM.

The chief time suckers involve internal decision making. For example, the initial choice about what to manage involves a range of issues: What kind of storage hardware -- as well as systems hardware, such as servers -- will come under the SRM tools? Will data within the storage gear be managed? What about data crossing the wire to the SAN or NAS? Will policies be set for specific types of data?

All this requires cooperation and concessions amongst groups in an organization. This is never an easy goal, but unless all departments agree little progress can be made.Even if the politics are resolved more work, including manual intervention, is needed to tell the system what to automate and manage. The most sophisticated SRM tool that can track information down to the data type doesn't inherently know which documents are important and which are not. It's up to the user to set data values according to user, group, data type, and so on.

There's more: Even as users struggle to get SRM passed internally, they must also push their vendors for the best deal at the right price. SRM wares can be in the six-figure realm and, even for that, some products still don't handle multivendor management very well. Though standards are in process, there is still much ground to cover.

Ultimately, firms that want SRM will wind up working hard. Not only will they have internal hurdles, but they'll probably wind up dealing with multiple vendors as well.

It can be worth it. The report states that a "best of breed" approach involving products from multiple SRM vendors is probably the most difficult strategy to implement, although once implemented it's likely to get the most accurate and complete results.

Companies analyzed in this report include: CA Inc., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Ltd., IBM Corp., Network Appliance Inc., Symantec Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. Other companies mentioned in this report include BMC Software Inc., CreekPath Systems Inc., NTP Software Inc., Onaro Inc., and Softek Storage Solutions Corp.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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