Storage Device Management Software

Storage management refers to activities undertaken by IT managers and administrators to achieve storage infrastructures' accessibility, reliability, recoverability, and optimal performance.

Despite the significant advantages resulting from the consolidation of data storage in modern computing systems, there are at least two fundamental problems of data storage management - high cost and inefficient use. Even if the cost of disk memory is reduced by an average of 30% per year, the demand for it increases by 100% during the same time, so the total amount of data storage costs will grow by 40%. The fact that memory is used inefficiently has a sensitive effect on meager IT budgets. So is it possible to control disk assets in order to get the most return on investment?

Positive answers to these questions are provided by the storage resource management system. For example, what should an administrator do if he is responsible for accessing data at the bank if customer service is suspended at the very height of the trading day due to slow application performance? One of the probable reasons is that the disk space required by the application is almost exhausted. How quickly does the network administrator identify the true cause of the collapse? Could he have foreseen and prevented her? If it was possible to set a threshold for the acceptable size of free disk space in the relevant rules, he would have received a notification in advance that the file system was about to begin to run out of disk space, and would be able to take appropriate measures in time.

Storage networks today require constant high availability - a good reason to use monitoring systems and analysis tools not only when a problem has already arisen. In addition, a comprehensive overview of the storage network is usually required.

In large data centers, managing drives is significantly more expensive than acquiring them. When using, in particular, SAN, thanks to centralized administration and management through switches and directors, it was already possible to significantly save on management. With scalable storage capacity in SANs, high availability and performance make it easy to provide and manage bulk storage in large data centers. However, increasing capacity, increasing data transfer rates, heterogeneous equipment from different manufacturers and virtualization technologies make monitoring the structure of storage networks and analyzing internal processes more and more difficult. Obviously, for the network administrator, they create new difficulties, which in professional jargon are called "network blindness." By this we mean the inability to diagnose, analyze and prevent failures, and, in addition, complex protocols and structures reduce network performance.

Overcoming “blindness” is of great practical importance. Many companies risk significant damage already in the first four hours after the failure, and the loss of enterprises specializing, for example, in electronic commerce and financial institutions, reaches hundreds of thousands or even several million dollars per hour. These figures once again convince us that there is a need to respond very quickly to failures and performance problems.