Enterprise storage management will come into its own when these three technologies can be integrated, says Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Storage Group, a research company in Milford, Mass.

And therein lies the rub. The technologies are in various stages of development, and CIOs can't count on implementing all of them at once. Brian Lock, MasterCard International's vice president of architecture development, thinks that SRM technology is going to be robust enough for MasterCard to implement it in the next year or so, whereas the storage virtualization technology, while intriguing, is not quite ready for prime time. "Getting a tool for storage virtualization is a little further out. The companies are newer, and it's a tricky technology," he says.

Tart has recently started using Computer Associates' SRM software in an effort to better manage storage capacity on his SANs. He says that although he's "very early" in implementation, his staff has already identified 3 terabytes of unused storage hiding out in the company's 50-odd terabytes of storage. "We're going to have to continually better manage our networked capacity, and that's going to require more than just manpower," he says. "We'll need automated tools to get it done."

The (Future) Lord of the Storage Jungle

How will the CIO know when the storage jungle has been mastered? Duplessie thinks the future will look a lot like this: IT will be able to analyze storage usage at a granular level, accounting for storage needs by department or line of business. "Today, we can't delineate between storing Steve the Moron's goofy .mpeg download and an OracleOracle database transaction," says Duplessie. Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de