SRM Segment Collapses

Several years ago, SAN and SRM software promised to be the next hype in storage software with all features needed to manage and control SAN environment and all the data associated management. Vendors seemed to choose to merge these two approaches in one new offering – the new SRM – with all physical and logical management capabilities. But even with that momentum, the market adoption was slow, really slow. With Onaro acquisition by NetApp for $120 million and just validated by regulators, one of the last SRM pure player "disappears" as Arkivio was also recently captured by Rocket Software.

I’m sure you remember some famous SRM name in the past like CreekPath, acquired by Opsware for approximately $10 million in 2006 and then Opsware by HP last year, of course probably one of the best, AppIQ, captured by HP in 2005 for around $300 million, Astrum grabbed by EMC in 2003. Crosswalk is not present anymore on the market. The  Veritas Command Central, a real solution owned by Symantec, is not promoted seriously. Storability was bought by StorageTek in 2004 and, in 2001,  SANnavigator, now a Brocade product, was acquired by McData for $30 million.

So what happened? Pretty nothing and it’s exactly the issue there. Nobody really adopts and choses SRM solutions. Even large vendors, with their own products, have difficulties to sell them. They finally serve as a marketing tool with no revenue associated at all. Some of them continues to be shipped as standalone product or were merged in larger solutions sets.

The storage industry introduced some time ago a new wave, the famous ILM. There was a lot of promises and expectations, but nothing was really delivered. The beauty of the vision were well recognized and articulated by vendors and even the SNIA. But the first ILM products were limited to address the IT need, without a real integration with the business operations and vertical activities.

It’s a shame as SRM has almost everything in term of storage infrastructure knowledge and application’s data attributes key factors for data movement between storage tiers.

Now a shift occurs again with the appearance of indexing engines with their content features which promises to be the pivotal element to understand data and meta-data, allowing the finest granularity in term of data placement and retention to align data value and storage cost. More and more storage vendors partner with indexing companies such Autonomy, CopperEye, Coveo, Endeca, Exalead, Fast (recently captured by Microsoft), Google, Index Engines or X1. Based on that technology, next solutions promise to be the right ones and deliver what end users expect.

Jim Woods