Leading analyst groups recently stated that over the last couple of months, storage resource management (SRM) has enjoyed increased end-user interest, and some even predict that the market will reach $4 billion by 2006. This is a positive prospect and confirms SRM`s increasingly important role in the management and utilisation of storage resources.
Dion Gerrans, brand manager for storage at Computer Associates Africa, takes a closer look at SRM, discussing key topics that will provide users with a better understanding of the software.
The first generation of SRM solutions provided basic features such as reporting, monitoring and trend analysis that gave IT administrators some insight into their storage environments.
However, due to more complex user demand we, today, have SRM solutions that are more mature and offer advanced features that enable business-critical functions such as strategic planning.
Recent SRM solutions provide storage management capabilities that deliver resource-efficient best practices and, importantly, facilitate the effective management of a storage infrastructure.
Key SRM functions
Disasters and loss of critical business-critical data are increasingly forcing storage administrators to conduct post-disaster recovery analysis in order to re-evaluate how their data is protected.
In addition, they must also consider the operational activities that need to be fine-tuned, which in turn optimises the performance storage infrastructure as a whole.
However, to adequately prepare for, and assess storage, companies need to implement a sound methodology that will realise "storage best practices".
SRM provides the functionality to facilitate storage management practices.
These "best practices" can be successfully attained with the software`s data collection, reporting, monitoring, capacity planning, event management, scheduling, automation and advanced resource management capabilities.
SRM also provides information on physical and logical objects, file and server systems and storage subsystems that offers enterprises insight into how storage is affecting the overall IT landscape.
Additionally, SRM software provides end-to-end mapping between the physical storage objects (physical disks on RAID array) and logical objects (volumes).
So, by utilising SRM to survey the storage landscape for data consolidation planning purposes, administrators can easily differentiate and classify storage objects.
Migrating to NAS and SAN
Migrating to centralised storage solutions such as NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage area network) means that IT administrators must determine which I/O files or intensive files, applications and servers are being accessed the most.
Again, SRM can provide IT administrators with information on the location of files and the owners, file types, files of certain sizes, grouping of files and read/write frequency.
This all will provide information on the overall storage capacity, stress on server as well and application and data bandwidth - enabling a more effective and seamless migration to storage centralisation.
Storage capacity planning
By determining current, past and future capacity requirements, storage administrators can plan what has be allocated to support and accommodate future server and application growth, as well as performance requirements.
This is where SRM plays a key role, as storage-related data is collected via automated, policy-driven data-collection engines. Historical and current storage metrics are, therefore, in the SRM repository and patterns are identified through trend analysis and forecasting.
Importantly, the software also provides reports on aged, duplicate, obsolete, un-owned or temporary files that can be migrated or removed to improve capacity planning.
Determining storage usage
Consolidating and centralising storage management can be extremely costly, which is why administrators must be able to account for storage consumption by individual users within the enterprise.
SRM solutions provide the ability to create logical configurations of users. These tools also define "classes" of objects, allowing administrators to logically group disparate storage objects and manage them as a unit.
In addition to determining storage consumption, SRM allows storage administrators to export consumption metrics to integrated or customer-chosen chargeback and billing applications.
Benefiting from SRM
SRM enables storage "best practices" which in turn realises companies` high data availability, business continuity, enhanced scalability and effective budget planning requirements.
Importantly, SRM lowers total cost of ownership by providing guidelines on the use of resources, which empowers companies to invest in solutions that cater for their specific needs, no more, no less.
As SRM tools` functionality continues to grow, so will South African and global storage administrators and companies benefit from simplified, but more effective storage environments that are optimised for today`s economic, IT-driven climate.
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