SRM Tests Willingness to Spend

For years, management of storage has been separate from management of servers, applications, networks, and other IT infrastructure. That may be changing at last, though solutions will be costly and complicated for a long time to come.

Yesterday's news that Hewlett-Packard has combined StorageWorks SRM with server management software in a new division is proof that big storage suppliers want to combine a range of IT management functions in umbrella products. (See HP Reshuffles More Software.)

The question is, what kind of umbrella is really needed? And what level of integration between storage management and the broader roster of systems management functions is both affordable and practical?

For HP and other big vendors, the goal appears to be to offer software that puts a supplier's system and storage management apps into a common interface with secure access. Customers will still pay handsomely for individual management apps, and there won't be any fancy correlations or combination views. Indeed, it will probably be a long time before deeper integration materializes.

"The focus seems to be on application services management -- with drill-down and integration with the underlying resource management tools, using them with other analytics to solve the underlying problem," writes Richard L. Ptak, principal analyst at Ptak Noel & Associates. While suppliers aren't emphasizing sophisticated SRM in these new wares, it represents a rich area for exploitation, he maintains.Symantec downplays the need for any kind of complicated integration of SRM and other management functions. "Most customers want centralized incident management," says Sean Derrington, director of storage management at Symantec. This includes consistent authentication and authorization control. If you can put all of it into a Web-based console interface with links to other systems, frameworks, and applications -- so much the better.

Symantec calls its console interface Data Center Foundation, to which it adds different underlying management packages. One of these is Application Performance Management (APM), which offers a dashboard that shows application availability and performance metrics. (See Symantec Adds Dashboard.) If something goes awry, the IT staffer can find the storage array or even the spindle the app is running on. The Web-based menu then allows the user to click into Veritas Storage Foundation to solve the problem more directly -- by moving LUNs, for example. There are also links to Server Foundation and NetBackup as well.

EMC takes a similar approach, through its Smarts product line, augmented by software acquired from nLayers last summer. (See EMC Nets nLayers, Scopes Security.) As with Symantec, multiple products are required: The EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager incorporates application monitoring via EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager and EMC Smarts Application Connectivity Monitor, with SRM coming through a third package, Storage Insight for Availability, which in turn has links to EMC's ControlCenter SRM tools. Got that?

All of it works only with EMC storage at present.

Bottom line? SRM will be integrated with system management wares, but it'll cost you, and you won't see a lot of fancy footwork. What's more, there will be glaring loopholes -- such as working only with a particular vendor's gear or with a certain SRM application -- that are likely to frustrate or repel some users for awhile.On the cost side, solutions like Symantec's and EMC's have lots of moving parts, and multiple price points. Customers will pay over $100,000 for a Smarts installation. Symantec's wares start at several hundred dollars per CPU, per package.

Other vendors have taken up the integrated management rallying cry in differing ways. Surprisingly, CA, notorious for "do all" claims in the past, isn't pushing efforts to integrate SRM with application or system management. "We have application monitoring solutions (CA Wily Introscope and eHealth)," writes CA spokesman Michael Kornspan in an email. "While CA continually evaluates its product portfolio to ensure we are meeting our customers needs, neither is integrated with our SRM solution today."

More sophisticated SRM-plus management tools may come from smaller vendors like Onaro, which recently added the ability to track applications for specific storage configurations. (See Onaro Adds New Storage Views.) Opsware (which purchased Creekpath last year) is also intent on creating integrated tools. (See Storage Shopping Spree.) There are also newer companies working on the issue, such as Tidal Software and Akorri. (See Akorri.)

Users themselves appear divided on just what it is they require. Whether a company really needs fancy integrated solutions may come down to the way it's organized. When asked whether he'd like to see application monitoring paired with SRM, Jake Roersma, manager of network engineering at Michigan's Priority Health, says, "There's probably value in it. But not for me in general." In his shop, there are administrators assigned to specific applications, such as databases, and others assigned to infrastructure issues, like Unix servers and storage. But there's no requirment for consolidated views.

On the other hand, Kim Jahnz, lead systems management analyst at Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, has been a fan of consolidated systems management applications for years. "When we first started doing performance management of applications from an end user perspective, no one was doing it," she says. With help from a few suppliers, such as CA, the firm has created a range of homegrown dashboards that can show the impact of changes in any part of IT on the overall performance of applications.Will suppliers find the middle ground between Roersma and Jahnz? Some seem intent on trying, while others think, perhaps correctly, that a halfway measure is good enough.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch