ZDNet UK

CNET NETWORKS UK BUSINESS SITES:
atlarge.com
BNET UK
silicon.com
SmartPlanet.com
ZDNet.co.uk

ZDNet.co.uk - Winner of Best Business Website 2007

You are here: ZDNet.co.uk > News > Hardware

Storage Toolkit

Top 10 storage pain points

Greg Ross Tech Republic

Published: 20 Jan 2005 18:20 GMT

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

Contrary to the experiences of some Tech Republic members, Information Life Cycle Management issues and regulatory compliance issues rated low in the survey.

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:

Simplify the technology with architectural standards to help reduce the cost and complexity and address negative perceptions regarding SANs and networked storage.

Accelerate education and certification of storage administrators, while simultaneously accelerating the adoption of standards and best practices.

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.