What are storage resource management tools good for?
Storage resource management has long been considered a large enterprise strategy. Also, it is not unusual for an SRM implementation to cost millions of dollars, attempt to handle a dozen or more tasks and take years to implement. “That’s what I describe as SRM 1.0,” said Rick Clark, president and CEO, Aptare Inc., Campbell, Calif. SMBs, however, can benefit from SRM, too. “Administrators at midsized organizations need to know how full their disks are just like at big enterprises,” said Greg Schulz, senior analyst, StorageIO, Stillwater, Minn. What they don’t need is the heterogeneous automated provisioning and other advanced features often built into storage resource management 1.0 tools, which drive up the cost and slow implementation. “What I call SRM 2.0 tools focus on the critical pain points; how much storage is being used, where, by whom and how quickly they’ll need more,” added Clark. They can leave automated provisioning and device management to the storage array vendors. Using
