Storage resource management promises to help bring down soaring storage costs.

Spiraling storage management expenses are part of a fundamental paradox in the storage industry. While storage capacity has become cheaper to deploy, the cost of managing that storage continues to increase.

As demand for storage continues to grow at a rapid pace, the storage management problem becomes even more acute — and storage demand isn’t expected to abate anytime soon. According to projections from IDC, external storage-system capacities will continue to grow at a compound annual rate of 50 percent or more through 2007.

Storage resource management (SRM) tools can help IT managers rein in exploding storage management costs. The typical SRM solution encompasses a broad range of functionality, including the processes and technologies required for capacity planning, discovery, configuration, monitoring, provisioning, performance and reporting of storage/backup devices and the underlying infrastructure. It provides a toolset that optimizes the management and utilization of storage resources to improve the availability and reliability of business-critical data while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).

Growing Demand

Most organizations lack a clear understanding of their storage inventory and usage patterns — in fact, many don’t even know how much storage they have. Some IT managers perform storage analyses using spreadsheets of data culled from a variety of tools, but few are able to optimize storage utilization or accurately forecast capacity demands. These realities are helping to drive demand for centralized SRM solutions.

The need to manage decentralized, heterogeneous storage environments with limited technical resources is another key driver in SRM adoption. SRM products use storage standards such as the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), as well as software agents and middleware tools, to discover, monitor and manage storage devices.

Organizations are also adopting SRM to meet business and regulatory requirements, and to aid in the deployment and management of storage consolidation and tiered storage solutions. SRM products can already identify the locations, ages and sizes of files, and some vendors are starting to incorporate data classification, indexing and search features.

SRM solutions can aid in disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. These tools can help minimize disruptions to IT operations by improving backup and recovery processes, ensuring application availability and performance, and facilitating the management of secondary data center operations.

Evolving Solution

Early SRM products were developed by storage hardware vendors to manage only their devices. Over time, SRM software evolved to better support heterogeneous environments, integrate with backup software and business applications, and include rudimentary analytics.

Today, SRM is also moving beyond centralized reporting to enable management of storage assets across the enterprise from a single view. Ongoing demand for SRM solutions is also leading to more effective storage provisioning as well as integration with policy-based data movement and archival tools. Sophisticated analytics improve decision making by identifying patterns of data usage.

SRM is becoming a powerful tool to combat the extreme costs of managing storage assets. New regulatory demands and data retention and archiving requirements, the need for more secure storage, and performance optimization and improved storage utilization are key requirements addressed by the latest SRM solutions. As organizations face storage challenges beyond the ever-increasing data loads, the value of a dependable SRM solution will only continue to increase.

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