chaos – (derived from the Ancient Greek ????, Chaos) typically refers to unpredictability, and is the antithesis of cosmos.

     When I began working at JRBM, Inc. back in 2004 it was a very small start-up company with lofty goals.  The idea was to unify both storage management, as well as, release a heterogeneous storage virtualization platform.  These concepts were nothing new to the industry, however, no one had successfully released a truly unbiased heterogeneous virtualization platform, and SNIA was still battling with vendors, plug-fests, and standardization for cross-platform storage management.  If any of you have participated in the early plug-fests hosted by SNIA at the Colorado Springs Lab you’ll remember long nights, pizza, and glazed eyes.  Well, JRBM, Inc. became Crosswalk, Inc. and Crosswalk Solutions, Inc., and finally ended up closing it’s doors in 2007.  A year later, in perfect hindsight, Crosswalk didn’t fail because of a bad product, or poor management, or lack of funding, it failed because the market wasn’t ready for real SRM, vendors weren’t committed to a new storage management standard, and at the end of the day customers are unwilling to sacrifice performance for heterogeneous storage virtualization.  That last statement is a topic for another day, but the first two I believe have relevance in today’s SRM challenges and recent success.

     A couple of years ago Jerome Wendt wrote a post for Tech Target on SRM software and things to consider for evaluating options.  I have taken the following bullets from that write-up. 

1. How quickly can it produce reports?
2. Do you need to do centralized reporting across sites?
3. Can you deploy server agents?
4. Are you a database- or file server-centric shop?
5. What type of management, if any, do you want the SRM tool to perform?
6. Do you want the tool to analyze and interpret your data?
7. Does the product integrate with Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol?
8. Is the SRM software part of a suite of products?
9. Is the product to be used enterprise-wide or just for one department?
10. How often are updates of the product being released?

     In 2006 I most likely would have agreed with Jerome, however, in 2008 I think the list is different.  Here would be my criteria for choosing an SRM package today.

1. Does it produce reports that allow actionable decisions to be made?
2. Will it report on the majority of products that I have currently in place, including products that are on the horizon for purchase?
3. Does this SRM package use a combination of methods for collecting data, utilizing open standards where available?
4. Will this SRM package be able to support reporting of my virtualized OS environment?
5. Is the software package from an Independent company that isn’t going to be locked into Vendor preference?
6. Will the tool handle both real-time metrics as well as historical metrics?
7. Does this product allow me set set full roles based users based on varying policies?
8. Will this SRM product be robust enough to be my single tool?
9. Will this product require months of professional services to be deployed and maintained?
10. Will this product reduce the administrative overhead of my infrastructure, help drive future IT purchases, and help give financial justification to those future purchases?

  In 2008, traditional servers are becoming a thing of the past giving way to blade based systems.  Fibre Channel storage is slowing becoming just one of the protocols in the data center for storage rather than THE protocol for storage, and storage silos are being unified storage platforms and virtualized storage pools.

     About 6 years ago I came across a gentleman by the name of Ken Barth.  At the time I was working on server and storage assessment services for StorageTek.  We were looking for a toolset that would meet our needs, easy to deploy, easy to run reports from, and could possibly be able to leave it behind as a tool for the customer to use on-going while we captured some product revenue from it.  We had looked at Netreon’s SANexec which had some very cool Visio based functionality, as well as Storability’s GSM product.  In the end StorageTek made a business decision to purchase the SOC (Storage Operations Center) from Storability, which forced us to use the GMS product that still lives on today as a SUN Microsystems product, SUN StorageTek Operations Manager Software.  However, there was another product that we tested, and while early on in development, it was ranked the highest among the PS consultants involved and was called Storage Profiler.  We actually utilized this tool quite successfully for several engagements.  Ken Barth was/is the CEO of Tek-Tools, the company that produces Storage Profiler. 

     The story doesn’t stop there.  I was recruited out of StorageTek by JRBM, Inc.  In order to get to market fast we re-branded Storage Profiler within the CSM (Crosswalk Storage Manager) suite.  Post Crosswalk, I thought that even though Ken and I have had a wonderful business relationship, for at the time several years, that the chances our paths would cross again, pretty low.  However, we had kept in touch, even though Crosswalk dropped the whole CSM product line to move on to a CFS (clustered file system) appliance.  I also, got to enjoy watching announcement after announcement and partnership after partnership involving Tek-Tools and many major companies.  The most recent of those being an announcement about a strong services partnership with Glasshouse, and tighter integration with VMWare.  I’m planning on taking a deeper dive into the Storage Profiler current release in the next couple weeks and look forward to seeing a product that continues to mature and grow, and without a doubt will become the standard all other SRM tools are compared against.