Previously I’ve discussed writing SRM software and I’ve done just that with a company I’ve been working with for some months: http://www.storagefusion.com/. Whilst this might be a shameless plug, I can honestly say that as a product (in the reporting space at least) SRA will harmonise storage reporting more than anything else out there today. Here’s why:

1. It doesn’t rely on generic standards for reporting, but gets the full detail on each platform.
2. It uses element managers or management console/CLIs to retrieve data.
3. It doesn’t need additional servers or effort to deploy or manage.
4. It normalises all data to provide a simple consistent framework for capacity reporting.

Now reporting is good, but management is hard by comparison. Reporting on hardware doesn’t necessarily break it – SRM software which changes the array could – therefore it needs to know exactly how to interact with an array and therefore requires decent API access.

Vendors aren’t going to give this out to each other, so here’s a proposal:

Vendors fund a single organisation to develop a unified global SRM tool. They provide API access under licence which doesn’t permit sharing of that API with competitors. As the product is licensed to end users, each vendor gets paid a fee per array per GB managed so thay have some financial recompense for putting skin into the game.

Anyone interested?