2004 storage management predictions: It's time for SM software to deliver |
 |
EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Norbert Haag
|
|
|
| > |
QUESTION POSED ON: 08 January 2004
Norbert Haag takes a look into the future of storage management and sees SMI-S going full speed ahead, users and vendors still clashing on interoperability issues and the need for software products to deliver.
|
|
| > |
|
Cont'd....
Storage management software? Will the mergers and acquisitions made by EMC, Veritas, etc. start showing themselves as tangible products?
The experiences of last year showed us that acquisitions of software companies by hardware vendors don't seem to go well. Anyway, the future doesn't equal the past as the saying goes. If vendors learn not to use their software as a "give away" to sell their hardware and, software vendors learn not to use storage resource management software to spice up their own products, tangible products will emerge.
EMC is certainly one of the companies, if not "the" one, that understood the importance of services and being a service company rather than just acting like one. The announced acquisition of VMware shows clearly where EMC is heading too. VMware has a powerful concept that has the capability to incorporate complete operating systems into a file. Think about a virtual machine -- that is what VM stands for -- that is completely existent within a file be it a Linux server, a Windows 2000 client or another operating system. And, with just the click of a mouse you can start running that virtual server inside the window of your current operating system.
Because virtually the whole machine exists in a file that in turn exists in "storage", immense possibilities to enhance reliability, scalability and accessibility would exist using such a concept. It might be possible to run hundreds of Web servers, each on its own virtual machine, on one big mainframe for example. Therefore, adding a new Web server is as easy as copying a file. Backing up a complete machine is as easy as backing up a file. Backing up a complete virtual server farm is as easy as snapshooting a storage cabinet.
So, to wrap things up, some of the mergers and acquisitions will turn out to develop some very tangible products for the market while others might take form last year's experiences simply vanish or at best, stay as an item number on the vendor's shelf.
What user needs will advances in storage management fulfill in 2004?
Personally, I believe that the more pressure IT departments realize in 2004 to adapt their processes and procedures to new process management methods like Six Sigma -- the process management methodology of choice for more and more companies -- the need for measuring all kinds of parameters and to analyze and interpret them will significantly increase.
As a result, the need for software products that deliver such data will rise. From that perspective, there will be more requests for storage management software that delivers such information, is vendor independent and will be easy to install and run.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search and Browse the Expert Answer Center
Search and browse more than 25,000 question and
answer pairs from more than 250 TechTarget industry experts.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
