Many enterprise customers are dragging their feet on adopting and implementing storage resource management (SRM) offerings, leaving their IT environments in danger of data overruns, capacity planning woes and poor storage strategy execution, according to a study by Forrester Research.

Offering a close look at the SRM landscape in terms of available tools, underlying complexity and multiple approaches to functionality, the study includes feedback from 35 SRM-related providers, including EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, CA, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance, CommVault, MonoSphere, Onaro, TeraCloud, Novus Consulting Group and Tek-Tools.

According to Forrester, storage vendors brandishing SRM tools and functionality have yet to properly educate or convince companies of the value SRM can bring to IT infrastructure and storage operations. Exacerbating the problem, homegrown tools being "cobbled together" piecemeal to substitute for SRM's monitoring, reporting and capacity management abilities leave many organizations unable to discern how many terabytes of raw storage they're running, said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at US-based Forrester.

"Customers still don't seem to see the value of [SRM]," he said. "I think they're intimidated by the complexity and expense of most tools. To me, [organizations] don't have table stakes of 'where are we', and I think that's pretty consistent across most companies that are customers of any of these [SRM] tools."

Without SRM in place - and with no ability to reclaim large volumes of wasted space - capacity management can be a more arduous task. For example, storage allocation can be easily misaligned, affecting resource utilization. Strained capacity can lead storage and IT administrators into bad decision making and prompt them to reactively buy storage at a higher-than-normal price.

According to Reichman, most of the SRM tools studied by Forrester are seen by users as not being "actionable" enough and only show where storage problems exist. In fact, the study concludes that many of the SRM tools offered by larger-size vendors require a full-time administrator to keep SRM groomed, accurate and updated - a tough proposition for storage environments running a tight productivity and budgetary ship, he said.

As far as the vendors studied are concerned, the IT research firm pointed to a number of areas they must address to alleviate user concerns and foster adoption. That list includes streamlining the agent deployment process to pinpoint which servers are agentless; automated pushing out of agents, bolstering backup integration, making out-of-the-box capacity planning easier, adding storage virtualization functionality to help alleviate complex storage configurations and offering professional services.

As a result of exploding data growth, regulatory and compliance mandates and growing heterogeneity within data centres and storage environments, Reichman noted that customers can ill afford to overlook the importance of SRM in driving business growth.

"I hear the argument [by users] that maybe we don't need SRM... It seems that most companies have this perception they can put it off," he said. "But with the pace of data growth out there, what they're currently using isn't going to work and [will] only become more cumbersome. They're going to limp along without [SRM]."