Management challenges centre on storage resource management (SRM) and storage area network (SAN) management tools that are expensive, difficult to justify, complex, and incomplete. End users are left using multiple tools that don’t interoperate. Automated provisioning solutions are still considered to be vaporware. Without these tools and solutions, SAN performance and reliability issues are difficult to avoid, detect, diagnose, and resolve.
The top ten pain points named in the survey were:
- Cost
- Managing growth and capacity
- Infrastructure management
- Lack of integrated or interoperable solutions
- Increasing complexity of the storage infrastructure
- Poor service and support
- Lack of desired functions and features
- Justifying expenditures
- Undelivered promises
- Lack of automation for provisioning
The SNIA End User Council stated that the root cause of storage pain was a lack of broad fundamental understanding of how to architect, provision, and scale storage area networking technology solutions. To try and combat this problem, the EUC proposed two main initiatives involving architectural standards and education:
Follow-up EUC discussions with attendees at October's Storage Networking World conference verified that the pain points indicated that real solutions need to be implemented.
Heading into 2005, simpler and more effective SAN management is sure to be at the forefront of most IT managers’ concerns. But an even bigger concern may lie with finding the talent to manage their infrastructures. Some IT managers state that there is currently a shortage of qualified storage network professionals in their organisations. Add to this the dissatisfaction with the quality of support, and you can see why storage management concerns have grown in recent times.
According to the report, many customers have expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of support, both pre- and post-sale. Complaints range from a lack of product knowledge and technical "gotchas" to technology over-hype. Customers who have the expertise on staff are using them to verify technical solutions promised by vendors. This is work for which they used to depend on pre-sales engineers.
These concerns have been captured into a second survey for EUC members and the IT professional community titled, "Storage Management: Where Are We Now?" Work on the next survey is underway with results due at the Fall 2005 Storage Networking World Conference.
