Use storage resource management to ease capacity planning pain

Let's focus on the element of storage management most relevant to determining how much of your storage is utilized and who is consuming it. Today, storage resource management (SRM) predominantly deals with capacity management -- that is, tools that provide current snapshots of storage capacity, trend analysis and quota management. Longer-term SRM will likely become a key feature of policy management that weaves together management consoles, capacity management, and provisioning and automation.

Capacity planning is the most-mentioned pain point for storage managers. Yet a significant number of them haven't deployed SRM products yet. That will change in 2003. SRM is on the short list of must-have tools, since knowing what capacity is used will deliver cost savings for customers trying to better manage their storage systems. Large vendors are rolling out SRM tools today, and over the past six months several startups were snapped up by market heavyweights.

SRM is a foundation technology for moving data center storage environments to a storage services (storage utility) approach. Making storage stakeholders into consumers as well as subscribers to a service approach is gaining traction with larger enterprises setting up IT data centers as service bureaus. It will take more time to reach the broader market, although SRM is quite a

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Architecturally, SRM today focuses on storage capacity and availability. SRM tools include a relational database architecture (some tools still use flat-file architectures), rules-based engines, reporting tools that might include host agents, and reports. Customers can gather information about files, tracking capacity and utilization (as well as trends around it), server availability and backup planning. Increasingly, SRM tools provide metrics that are application specific (for email and databases), or combine intelligent policy management features from storage network management, array or provisioning.

Here are some questions to ask vendors about their SRM products:

Got a question about SRM? Post it in the Storage Management Tips and Tricks discussion forum.

About the author: Jamie Gruener is the primary analyst focused on the server and storage markets for the Yankee Group, an industry analyst firm in Boston, Mass. Jamie's coverage area includes storage management, storage best practices, storage systems, storage networking and server technologies.

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