SRM: Don`t underestimate this storage optimiser

Despite the numerous and quite frankly, obvious benefits of storage resource management (SRM), the software has not taken the world by storm. Although SRM has so much promise, analysts and vendors alike are still calling for wider adoption.

You might ask, why the hype and the `must-deploy` frenzy? The reality is that SRM is just one of those solutions that end-users really `get` and quickly see the resultant benefits and ROI.

SRM complements companies` overall storage infrastructure strategy, improving efficiency, increasing storage utilisation and managing their environments in a more uniform way.

Fortunately, there are already a number of organisations that are making SRM the cornerstone of their storage management environments, which are now more efficient and data-centric than ever before. Also, vendors are now offering users storage features they really want - mature functionality and feature integration.

For example, larger organisations are now taking advantage of SRM`s ability to provide detailed information on what and how storage assets are being used.

With this maturity, companies should also start thinking of utilising SRM in the larger context of information lifecycle management (ILM). ILM should become, if anything, a component of SRM.

Another key aspect of SRM that impacts both large and mid-sized organisations are capacity planning and provisioning - previously tedious and manual processes that tended to be error-prone.

Storage capacity is growing exponentially - by as much as 50% per year at some organisations; however, a lot of this growth comes in the form of unstructured data.

Here, storage management offers a viable solution. Instead of riding a runaway horse, exercise a new level of control over storage through the utilisation of SRM software.

The software, for example, provides trending and forecasting reports that enable planning for future storage growth without over-provisioning capacity. Importantly, it offers detailed and in-depth reports that identify aged, duplicated, obsolete and orphaned files, among others, that can be either archived, removed or moved to cheaper media.

Also, in the early days of SRM, tools providing basic monitoring and reporting didn`t provide active management and detailed drill-down capabilities. Now SRM offers active and passive views that extend from application down to the device level.

And on the topic of reporting and monitoring, SLAs (service level agreements) and the concept of chargeback are also sparking end-user interest in SRM. The software is key enabler for the internal on-demand (or utility) model.

Today`s storage administrators want the ability to - in an on-demand environment - track the services they provide and charge back if necessary.

Indeed, current SRM offerings enable companies to understand their data and what it means to a specific application or their business. The time is now to, with the help of SRM, utilise your infrastructure to support business-critical requirements.