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Why is Data Storage Management So Difficult?

Unfortunately, storage management tools have less functionality across different vendor platforms and are far most costly than equivalent network management tools. Data storage Henry Newman discusses the trends. Most people I speak with at network operations centers (NOCs) rate today’s network management tools as very good or excellent. However, the same cannot be said for […]

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Henry Newman

Nov 18, 2010

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Unfortunately, storage management tools have less functionality across different vendor platforms and are far most costly than equivalent network management tools. Data storage Henry Newman discusses the trends.

Most people I speak with at network operations centers (NOCs) rate today’s network management tools as very good or excellent. However, the same cannot be said for storage management tools. This is not entirely the fault of the vendors, given the complexity of storage management compared to networking. So why is storage management and monitoring so difficult compared to network management and monitoring? What do the next few years holds for storage management? In my opinion, we are moving from storage management hell to storage management purgatory.

The Current Landscape

In the current environment, there is a very big difference between what can be accomplished within the standards process in network management and storage management. Much, if not most, of the network management world is controlled by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – a standards body with worldwide participation from many communities, not just vendors. The IETF has had, and will continue to have, participation from a wide variety of sources including the research and user communities. Additionally, network management and monitoring is much simpler given that the number of vendors that make networking equipment is small in comparison to the number of vendors making storage equipment. The 7 OSI layers and network complexity is far more straight forward than storage management. The OSI layers are well defined:

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Henry Newman

Henry Newman has been a contributor to TechnologyAdvice websites for more than 20 years. His career in high-performance computing, storage and security dates to the early 1980s, when Cray was the name of a supercomputing company rather than an entry in Urban Dictionary. After nearly four decades of architecting IT systems, he recently retired as CTO of a storage company’s Federal group, but he rather quickly lost a bet that he wouldn't be able to stay retired by taking a consulting gig in his first month of retirement.