I am SAM

By Siobhan Chapman

SAM (storage-area management) is the hottest new acronym to be appended to storage vendor product releases, according to Gartner analysts. However, pick your SAM wisely.

Gartner predicts that a lack of mature storage management offerings will cause storage capacity growth to stall by 2004. Yet, as storage management costs figure more into storage purchasing decisions today, Gartner predicts that SAM will be the "next big thing".

"Management solutions have been slow to emerge, which will cause the storage market to stall for several years as we wait for these tools to mature," Phil Sargeant, research director at Gartner, told delegates at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2002 in Sydney on Wednesday.

"We’ve had a number of inquiries in recent months from vendors wanting Gartner to describe their products as 'SAM something'. This is an early symptom of SAM’s status as the next 'big thing'," he said, adding it is "unlikely" that a software package in the near term will have all of the essential characteristics for SAM practice.

Mr Sargeant explained that today's storage administrators face the same problem of managing storage that mainframe storage customers did in the mid 1980's. Before the birth of system managed storage (SMS), mainframe storage customers weren't growing capacity fast enough, but spent most of their time managing the storage boxes.

Today storage administrators are finding themselves in a similar quandary however, unlike the mainframe environment, this space is highly heterogeneous and complex, Mr Sargeant said.

Storage buyers should "think SAM, not SAN", Mr Sargeant said.

Mr Sargeant also urged customers to demand a clear road map from storage vendors showing how and when they will conform to this model and push for SAM value propositions.

In addition, enterprises should budget for training and SAM software to leverage staff resources and plan to replace SAM software as SAM products mature.

Users evaluating software for its potential to support and enhance a SAM practice should look for the following characteristics: it has clear support for the consumer to administrator relationship; It manages across all or most of the layers in the application--to-disk stack; It provides a single, universal pool of information for all layers and modules to mine; It provides higher levels of intelligence in informing and or controlling across the entire storage area; It automates functions across the entire storage area; It automates practices across the entire storage area.

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