It's time for storage management software vendors to go back to the drawing board ... again. Storage readers still favor the applications and element managers they get with their hardware over storage resource management (SRM) suites by more than 2:1 -- 45% to 21%, almost the same split we saw a year ago on our survey. Nearly one-third use some kind of point product to address specific management needs, and 26% still rely on Excel spreadsheets. Thirty-four percent cited configuration management as the area where they need the most help, similar to last year's number. But just slightly less (32%) said managing capacity was a key need, a huge turnaround from last year when only 1% said capacity management was a priority. That big swing can probably be attributed to the inexorable need for...

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"I have no hope for a single uber-tool to perform SRM. It will, for the foreseeable future, be a cobbled together assortment of tools (in-house and vendor) to do the job." -- Survey respondent

BIO: Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.