Can Storage Resource Management Save Us From Ourselves? We Quiz 9 SRM Vendors To Find Out.: Page 2 of 4

YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN
Storage resource management can't halt sprawl by itself. Data growth will, ultimately, drive storage capacity increases even in well-managed infrastructures. However, the reality is we can't see capacity clearly because of vendor "proprietariness" that's exacerbated by sleight-of-hand technologies, including thin provisioning, deduplication, and virtualization.

Because you can't manage what you can't see, SRM is supposed to give us clarity and visibility into what we have so we can administer it more effectively. That's one ingredient of a real strategy for containing sprawl. The other components fall under data management, including hierarchical storage management and granular intelligent archiving based on data class and policy. Combined, SRM and data management equal effective storage management.

The problem is, there is no standard set of SRM functionality (see story, "Key Functions That Define SRM"), so IT buyers need to have a clear set of objectives they're trying to address, lest they wind up with a bottomless project that devours time and resources like the storage infrastructure it was meant to tame.

"Identify where you plan to make savings that will pay for the product and deployment," says CA's Marco Coulter, VP of software engineering, and Todd Michaels, product manager.

Easy for them to say, but this goes to the heart of an issue long plaguing SRM. "The price tag for off-the-shelf SRM is too high, and so Perl and my backup server have become fast friends to give me some analysis reports on storage utilization at my company," says one IT pro, adding that he tried SRM from Veritas-Symantec but ripped it out in short order, preferring the more exact and less cumbersome reporting he can achieve using Perl scripts.

To address the cost issue, Coulter and Michaels emphasize the need for "reusability value" in the information collected by SRM tools, which provide the means to retrieve a lot of stats about storage and data. These metrics can provide a foundation for other tasks, such as compliance and governance policy making and monitoring, file classification, and storage tiering. While Tek-Tools CEO Ken Barth agrees with the reuse potential of SRM data, he takes the pragmatic position that ease of installation and the ability to solve immediate needs quickly are most important. Too many SRM purchases result in software gathering dust on the shelf because no one has the time, budget, or manpower to undertake a deployment.

Dean Snyder from HP's Business Server Automation Group articulates a list of criteria, including the number of agents required, depth of heterogeneous vendor support, integration with enterprise management tools, and business app and cluster/virtual machine awareness. Snyder also adds to the list "viability of the supplier," which strikes us as a marketing tactic intended to dissuade readers from choosing SRM products offered by startups and small companies, such as Olocity. Don't discount smaller vendors--many are thinking outside the proprietary box. One such interesting company is MonoSphere, which is set to release technology to tag storage with equipment value, so you can see the cost not only to store data on a platform, but of inefficient use of that capacity.