Infrastructure-Centric or Storage Resource Management (SRM)


Infrastructure-Centric or Storage Resource Management (SRM)

Another storage management approach is the "horizontal" or infrastructure-centric approach, as depicted in Figure 8-4. About two years ago, there was a rush to this model for storage management, spurred on by hype around SANs and virtualization. (So pervasive was the marketecture that even prominent vendors , like Veritas Software, gave their products names with "SAN" in the title ”as if to assert that SANs were quickly displacing all other topologies for storage.)

Figure 8-4. Infrastructure-centric management.

graphics/08fig04.gif

The underlying argument of this approach is that, if you just keep the components of a SAN in good repair, the SAN itself it will provision storage to whatever application needs it. Today, these tools are typically referred to as Storage Resource Managers (SRM). [6] They integrate multiple task-oriented products or modules into a single product suite in order to deliver a consistent user interface and to reduce the user learning curve.

However, unless your environment includes all of the storage topologies (direct-attached, NAS and Fibre Channel SAN) supported by the suite, the software may seem overly complex to use. More than one user has complained that the problem with multifunction software suites is that they perform no function particularly well. Even "brand- name " SRM suites produce disgruntled users who are angered by the need to license software components for which they have no use or that lack, in their estimate, the best-of-breed features of other products in the market.

The savviest vendors in this space, like Ken Barth, who is CEO of Dallas, Texas “based Tek-Tools, suggest that SRM is, at best, "a kind of software development tool set."

Barth correctly observes that it is left up to the consumer to identify and select the "best of breed" tools from among a group of about 250 vendors, then use them to cobble together a storage management system that works reasonably well for his or her shop. Tek-Tools own offering in this space doesn't claim to do everything for everybody, and Barth notes that he actively seeks out partner vendors to supplement his own offerings to better meet customer needs. In lieu of storage standards that ensure the interoperability of all storage management software, Barth's view encapsulates the best approach available today.

Generally speaking, what SRM products fail to do is to associate the storage resource with the application that uses it. The "magic" that was supposed to provide this all-important function was never successfully developed in a SAN, arguably because Fibre Channel, which lacked the services of a true network protocol, could not support such "upper-stack" functionality.

SRM is currently undergoing change as leading vendors seek to develop more comprehensive resource management functionality in their products. This was prompted to some degree by the increasing focus on virtualization as a foundation technology for SANs and by the success of BMC Software in gaining market traction with its Application-Centric Storage Management (ACSM) vision in the early 2000s.



The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management
The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management
ISBN: 0130284165
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 96

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