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A new approach to SRM: the modular advantage.

Article Excerpt
Storage Resource Management (SRM) is the current hot industry buzzword, sparking a frenzy as enterprises and small to mid-size businesses rush to evaluate their SRM options, hoping to cash in on the potential cost savings promised by SRM technology.

As with most buzzwords, SRM can be defined in a variety of ways to describe a broad range of functionality, much of which goes beyond just administering storage. But in a nut-shell, it is all about providing a toolset that optimizes the management and utilization of existing storage/server/backup resources to improve the availability and reliability of business-critical data while lowering the TCO of enterprise storage. The typical SRM solution encompasses a broad range of functionality including the processes and technologies required for capacity planning, discovery, configuration, monitoring, provisioning, performance and reporting of storage/backup devices and the underlying infrastructure.

SRM is designed to solve what is perhaps the biggest challenge facing IT administrators: How to control the soaring costs of storage management. Excessive storage management expenses are part of a fundamental paradox in the storage industry where, as the storage capacity becomes cheaper to deploy, the cost of managing that storage continues to increase. As demand for storage continues...