Now I know how the little boy who pointed at the Emperor and shouted, 'But he's got no clothes on!' felt! It appears that everyone knew that the SRM tools weren't very good, even the vendors but no-one wanted to talk about it! That's not quite true but certainly wasn't getting discussed in open forums. The focus was on making arrays faster, bigger and more shiny!
Now, I appear to have got everyone talking about it and pretty much everyone acknowledging that there is a lot of work to be done in the world of SRM. I've got a couple of conference calls lined up with vendors who are going to give me and my team access to the developers. Now, they may be just trying to shut me up but I've decided to be positive and believe that there is a genuine desire to make SRM better.
I don’t think they are trying to shut you up but I have found there is a real disconnect between these discussions and implementation of feedback from the trenches.
And there may not be much they can do. Part of it is that – candidily – these SRM solutions are a mesh (or mess) of different programs all glued together. In some (all) cases – their foundations were poorly architected and developed – and then built on year after year after year increasing the mesh/mess.
It seems to me – that the large storage vendors don’t have a vision that focuses on SRM. And they have made such a huge investment that it is hard for them to step back. But I think that a multi-year project building new SRM tools is needed -taking everything they’ve learned and getting it right.
As far as agents go – performance, interoperability and easy management are the key. I think a tool that provides excellent agent deployment and reporting would be extremely useful. Smart agents provide a ton of value but if they are feeding a bloated SRM solution – what good does it do?
Additionally, more and more SMB customers are implementing relatively complex storage networks – they can’t absorb a big bloated SRM solution. However, they still do need intelligent tools to manage their environments.
The storage vendor that is brave enough to re-invent its SRM tools will benefit the most in the end.
Mmmm – think I will use this in my blog 🙂