Back to Excel!

When I started this blog what seems years ago; people got used to me railing against the state of storage management tools and especially SRM tools.

Since then I’ve changed roles and moved away from the more traditional corporate back-office storage environment and I really do not have the same level of exposure to the SRM tools and we have a much more simple infrastructure.

But this is beginning to change, our environment is growing incredibly quickly as we store more and more content and as we start to roll out more traditional IT storage to support our Creative teams; with over 20 arrays, multiple clustered NAS environments, multiple tape-libaries and back/archive environments, I am starting to look for a tool to manage and report on this heterogeneous infrastructure.

So I am starting to have another look at the state of the art with regards to Storage Management tools again….And sadly I am finding that the storage of the art is still woeful; the tools appear to have moved on not one iota.

I still find talking to peers and colleagues that spreadsheets are almost universally used; the vendors have still not yet delivered the improved tools that they were promising 2-3 years ago. I still hear ECC derided on a regular basis; I hear people expressing disappointment that NetApp’s stewardship of SanScreen has not delivered and IBM’s TPC is still lacking in features.

It does seem to be pretty much beyond the storage industry to deliver a tool to manage storage in an heterogeneous and scalable fashion. It’s obviously just not sexy and we should all move to integrated stacks or perhaps the Cloud; oh well, back to Excel!