Storage resource management (SRM) tools are used to improve the cost-effectiveness of storage hardware and operational processes. This has remained a fundamental value proposition from SRM vendors since Gartner started tracking the SRM market. As the number of storage technologies, innovations, features and products within the whole storage market increases, Gartner recommends that organizations understand their storage infrastructures and data in more detail so that they can make qualified decisions concerning the procurement and implementation of these solutions. For example, to justify an archiving project, an organization needs to know the age of the data and when it was last accessed. To implement thin provisioning, IT managers need to know their existing and historic storage utilization rates; and, if their organizations can proactively plan and schedule storage upgrades and capacity increases, rather than reactively purchasing upgrades, they will be in a better negotiation position with their suppliers.

A common method by which many organizations manage storage and attempt to obtain SRM data has been by writing in-house software, then manually transferring and combining data among sources using spreadsheets. However, this "build your own" model is not sustainable or trivial, and is far more expensive and inaccurate than most organizations realize. This is because the costs of in-house software development and support are hidden burdens that need to be accounted for. Additionally, internal SRM tool development poses risks to organizations when, for example, employees change jobs, an organization may have to redesign and rewrite undocumented and unsupported legacy systems. These in-house SRM systems require considerable investment in time and resources, and the result often produces an inconsistent service. The inflexibility of these in-house solutions also cannot adapt, and offer the breadth and depth of information provided by formal SRM products.

SRM tools have become simpler to use, purchase and implement. Suites of disparate point solutions have become integrated, and their quality and ability to diagrammatically and topologically display complex storage environments, storage within virtualized servers, and the interrelationship between applications and physical storage have improved. The trend toward agentless solutions continues, as more products have become agentless or have simplified their agent architectures.

The industry trend toward offering vertically integrated systems by vendors has affected the SRM market by forcing many holistic vendors that offer the widest variety of features to package their SRM products with general-purpose system management products. However, vendors promise that the SRM features and modules will still be available to be purchased separately.

The level of investment in software development, ongoing device support and compatibility costs for SRM vendors required to develop SRM device configuration functionality continues to increase. Often, the result is element managers that do not have the detailed functionality of the equivalent hardware array of vendor's configuration products. Therefore, SRM vendors have been deterred from expanding this market, which has led to many SRM vendors linking their software to native-device configuration tools and launching these from within the SRM suites. Fewer customers are using SRM tools for device management; and where the need for managing heterogeneous storage devices from one interface is a high priority, customers use storage virtualization solutions to virtualize and consolidate their disparate storage infrastructures. The alternative SRM solution, when IT departments pay for storage configuration tools twice — once with the physical device and again with an SRM product — has a high financial cost and is an important factor that few customers are willing to justify.

Gartner's position has not changed since the 2009 SRM Magic Quadrant, in that we believe the SRM market will segment into two product categories that mirror customer maturity: installed storage capacity and complexity. What has changed is that system vendors will merge their SRM offerings with their system management solutions required to manage vertically integrated computing platforms. Therefore, we still believe that the first group will consist of three to five major SRM vendors that will have holistic and comprehensive SRM products used in large, mature storage-heterogeneous enterprises. The second group will consist of three or four specialist SRM vendors offering fundamental SRM facilities to monitor use, performance and performance capacity planning for small to midsize enterprise customers.

The specialist vendors are outlined as follows:

• For storage area network (SAN) management, Brocade is the sole remaining pure-play vendor, and does not attempt to offer SRM functions outside the SAN. Virtual Instruments, although not covered in this Magic Quadrant, provides extensive Fibre Channel (FC) SAN performance and problem determination features for FC SANs, but does not provide SAN switch or host bus adapter (HBA) management.

• Other vendors (e.g., Northern Parklife and NTP Software) focus on capacity planning, file blocking and management on Microsoft Windows and network-attached-storage (NAS) filers using the Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols.

• Akorri, Aptare and SolarWinds concentrate on the core storage management features of providing storage management dashboards, capacity planning, storage reclamation, performance monitoring and storage utilization reporting from the application level to the storage device.

These specialist vendors do not offer workflow and storage-provisioning features, leaving device management to the tools that are supplied with the storage devices.

Although many customers have gained large cost savings by implementing SRM tools, most IT departments still focus on hardware solutions and innovations, rather than using SRM processes to improve storage management and contain costs. Additionally, SRM usage patterns continue to change from the requirement to use SRM tools for device configuration to more-detailed application and virtualized system reporting.

Since the last Magic Quadrant, there has been no change in the requirement for professional services. This increases the purchasing costs for customers buying holistic SRM products that recommend or mandate professional services during implementation. However, many of the niche SRM products do not require additional professional services.

Gartner advises customers to select solutions that can meet their requirements with the standard supplied reports, or to select products with the simplest and easiest-to-use report creation tools.

For a vendor to improve its position in a Magic Quadrant, it must track to the new market requirements and get ahead of them. As the SRM market evolves, expectations and requirements change. Because the Magic Quadrant is scored each year relative to the current market, vendors that have made slower progress than the overall market can appear to have moved backward, when, in fact, the entire market has moved forward.

A vendor's position on the Magic Quadrant should not be equated with its product's attractiveness or suitability for every client's requirements. If the solutions fit your needs better, have the appropriate support capabilities and are attractively priced, it is perfectly acceptable to acquire solutions from vendors that are not in the Leader's quadrant.

Only one acquisition has occurred in the market since the 2009 Magic Quadrant, which was the acquisition of Tek-Tools by SolarWinds.

Since the last Magic Quadrant, overall SRM market revenue has decreased, but more users have purchased SRM solutions. This indicates that pricing pressures and the search for increased efficiencies and productivity during the economic downturn have encouraged vendors to lower their prices, which has enabled more customers to purchase SRM products at a lower cost. The reasons why customers do not purchase SRM products are that they require management effort and the creation of processes or projects that take actions on the issues highlighted by the SRM reports. The ability of SRM tools to highlight bad storage management practices and low storage utilization levels forces IT management accountability, which may not be welcome, as it may force improved storage and IT management governance.

SRM tools have the potential for good or bad to open a "Pandora's box" of management problems. Therefore, the process of purchasing tactical hardware technologies where the responsibility for success lies with the hardware supplier and technology is often a more acceptable choice and a lower risk proposition. The constant requirement to update storage array hardware and the requirement to migrate from old devices and add new capacity often take priority over improving storage management. As long as the cost per gigabyte of storage reduces year over year, customers will often prefer to purchase more disk capacity instead of investing time and money determining which areas can be improved. This is similar to the paradigm created by Moore's Law, where the increasing number of transistors on a CPU provides no incentive to create more-efficient programs, as long as processor speeds increase. These hard improvements can mask the need for better storage and IT management. It is better to cure the problem than to prevent it.

Large-system vendors successfully use a direct sales force to increase sales; in comparison, channel sales for SRM have not been as successful. This may be due to the assumption that SRM solutions are complex to install and that the projects are long, thus increasing revenue recognition times. However, savvy resellers could exploit this by providing value-added services or reselling products from the niche vendors that are much simpler to implement. Generally, smaller SRM vendors that have simpler agentless or near agentless products and do not require lengthy and complex installation procedures choose to grow their products via the channel (value-added resellers [VARs]) or via OEM deals.

The distributed-system (nonmainframe) SRM segment, which includes SAN management software, grew by 4.9% (from $669 million in 2007 to $705 million in 2008). However, because of the global economic climate, the SRM market declined by 1%, to $695.5 million in 2009. From 2010 onward, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for SRM is expected to be 2% per year.

In terms of revenue, EMC had the largest market share, with $422 million in 2009. However, its growth declined by 8.9% ($41 million) from 2008. IBM, which had the second-largest share of the SRM market, grew its revenue by 18% ($15.5 million) to $102 million in 2009. HP's revenue declined by 12.5% ($7.4 million) to $51.8 million in 2009. NetApp grew the most, increasing its revenue by 454% ($26.6 million) to $32.5 million. Symantec grew revenue by 6.3% ($1.5 million) to $25.2 million, and revenue for CA Technologies declined by 35.4%, to $7.5 million revenue in 2009. The remaining vendors, grouped together, declined by 1.2% ($0.5 million), to $38.9 million in revenue in 2009.

Since the last SRM Magic Quadrant, and despite a decrease in overall market revenue, SRM innovation has continued, with most vendors releasing new and improved versions of their SRM products. The storage hardware vendors, which bundle their SRM solutions with hardware, can no longer expect increased SRM attach rates, as EMC's revenue has decreased for the past two years, as did HP's revenue in 2009. Niche vendors are holding their own; however, they're too small to affect the overall market. Nevertheless, vendors such as Aptare are demonstrating solid traction, and new vendors such as Storage Fusion and Virtual Instruments continue to be attracted to this segment.

In the past, one reason why vendors with the largest market share were successful was due to their ability to bundle the sale of their products with hardware sales. However, customers have recently expressed a preference for purchasing SRM solutions that are independent of their main or sole storage hardware supplier. The reason given for this is that organizations want an independent view for reporting and audit of the storage infrastructure, rather than having storage advice provided by the same supplier as for their hardware. This is supported by Gartner market statistics, which show that EMC and HP have had large decreases in revenue. However, IBM, which always aims to be cross-selling many products to increase attach rates for its captive customers, increased SRM revenue by 17.9%.

One of the earlier barriers to the adoption of independent SRM solutions was that they did not have equivalent levels of detailed device support as hardware vendors' SRM products. However, as the trend in the SRM market moves toward using SRM products as management decision support systems, which primarily require statistical information but do not need to perform device configuration, this benefit of cross-selling has decreased in importance, since the ability to report on the storage devices does not require the same depth of device support as device configuration. Therefore, it is still the case that companies that have paid for device-specific arrays and SAN device management tools that were bundled or attached to hardware purchases may only require the features that are not available within the device manager, such as capacity planning, usage monitoring and topology mapping. Vendors continue to implement device management by launching the specific device management tools from their products, thereby maintaining the illusion that device management is incorporated in their SRM products. New entrants into the SRM market and specialist SRM vendors are not developing or offering device management tools, and have left this to the hardware suppliers.

SRM vendors have continued to offer SRM tools in modules, rather than in complete suites; similarly, purchasing options have remained simple, with the ability to purchase starter packs that contain all the modules that perform the basic tasks. These smaller and lower-cost solutions make SRM more affordable by reducing this major cost inhibitor, and enable customers to manage their storage more effectively.

Hosting, outsourcing and large organizations that have a large number of heterogeneous storage arrays from many vendors look to SRM tools to improve storage administrator productivity by providing one storage-provisioning interface, change planning and problem determination aid. However, they do not use SRM tools to configure individual devices or elements in their storage infrastructures. Similarly, few customers manage to implement all of these high-level processes, such as workflow and advisory-oriented SRM features. Instead, customers have reacted pragmatically by purchasing subsets of the comprehensive tools, knowing they can implement these extra options, if required, in the future.

There was a gap in the market concerning detailed FC performance analysis and problem determination. Virtual Instruments, a spinoff from Finisar, is a new specialist vendor in this area that provides the NetWisdom product to solve these problems. Plans are to also support FC over Ethernet (FCoE). Not only can NetWisdom solve FC protocol and configuration issues, but it can also provide FC port and SAN switch consolidation advice by reconciling FC network usage, thus reducing the size and cost of any FC SAN infrastructure. Virtual Instruments has a comprehensive and very detailed FC SAN performance monitoring and problem determination tool. It is also the only vendor to offer this level of instrumentation in the market, and it is often used as a diagnostic tool but can also be used to save costs, as it can determine underutilized FC resources like ports and HBAs, which can be consolidated.

The cloud paradigm has also drifted toward the SRM market. Storage Fusion, a small but innovative SRM-as-a-service provider, has recently entered the market and has created a storm "in the cloud" by offering SRM reports as a service whereby organizations pay a quarterly or yearly fee. This expands the types of SRM services to organizations and provides alternate sourcing and acquisition options. Customers that adopt this model do not need to make a software capital purchase and the accompanying investment in management station hardware. SRM purchases using this method are paid for as monthly or similar charges and are, therefore, operational costs and not capital costs. Customers that are not sure of the value of a formal SRM solution can now invest, test and assess the value with manageable financial risk and staffing resources.

Due to the ever-increasing proportions of IT budgets being spent on storage and the wide differences between usage patterns and customer requirements, the SRM market will remain vast and varied. This will encourage segmentation and, therefore, will enable both major and specialist vendors to survive in this market.

SRM products provide data collection and automation agents that consolidate and operate on information from multiple platforms supporting storage management tools on multiple OSs, storage products and SAN devices. Key functions include capacity reporting/analysis, performance reporting/analysis, capacity/performance management automation, storage provisioning, storage management product integration, application and database integration, and hardware integration.

SRM solutions should integrate with network and system management offerings to enable SRM products to externalize events to other management products. Integration with device resource and replication management products, as well as media management products, should include launching hardware configuration utilities from the SRM console, collecting/reporting agent information and integrating logical-level data. Products that provide discovery, topology mapping and monitoring SAN components are also included in this segment, because many are included in SRM suites or are expanding to include SRM functionality.

The key components of an SRM solution are described in the sections that follow.

Central Administrative Console: The console is increasingly Web-based and provides a way to view storage resources and metrics, based on a user's profile and credentials. The product's security features will define the level of access and the breadth of view a user will have for role-based administration.

Discovery and Storage Information Repository: The SRM tool must be able to automatically identify new storage objects, and collect and store information on those objects in an information database. Data must be collected and stored so that it can be used to identify the current state of the environment, as well as conduct historical views and future trending. Data on managed storage objects includes metadata information on data files (such as size, date of creation and owner) and physical storage systems (including capacity and performance characteristics). The repository ties the storage information to the application and the user. The repository should be based on a commercially available or open-source relational database with an open and published schema so that it can be queried via standard database reporting tools. It should be able to manually add data about a given object, such as acquisition date, location and asset tag number. The data should be exportable to another relational database management system.

Capacity Management and Planning: This includes the activities to identify resource use. It also provides tools for reclaiming space for better resource use and ensuring that storage is available, as needed. The information stored in the repository is used to analyze trends and, using modeling and simulation, predict future capacity requirements by server, department, application and enterprise via user-definable groups that align with a line of business (LOB). It identifies the need to purchase more storage or networking devices.

Quota Management: This is a special capacity management function. A quota management application implements a corporate policy regarding the amount of disk space allowed per user. Many products offer only soft-quota management, which is informational. Hard quotas, those that stop allocation once the defined level of storage space is used, have most commonly been implemented in the Windows and NAS environments. Filters provide capacity management by preventing certain types of files from being saved to disk or tape, sometimes by scanning file content versus only detecting file-type extensions.

Performance Management: This should monitor, diagnose and optimize the performance of the application, server, HBA, storage network and storage devices. Because many of these resources are shared, the capability to model and understand complex interactions and their impact on performance is desirable. When performance issues are identified based on defined thresholds, events can be sent to notify storage administrators or trigger actions to correct the problem. Performance management functions should take advantage of historical views of the environment and event correlation techniques.

Event Management: This collects events sent from applications and devices that indicate, for example, a pending disk failure or an out-of-space condition. It then initiates the appropriate notification or triggers a predefined response to correct the problem. SRM products should be able to consolidate multiple events and percolate these events to systems and network management solutions.

Root Cause Analysis: This analyzes events to determine the underlying root cause, and eliminates the need for blind troubleshooting, which expedites the diagnosis process.

Reporting: This provides basic real-time and historical reports, and the capability to use reporting tools (including powerful online analytical processing tools) to create custom reports and views. The goal is to generate custom reports and have a few useful documents, rather than hundreds of reports.

Chargeback: This acts as the counting mechanism for billing users and LOBs for their consumption of storage resources. Comprehensive chargeback includes multiple cost metrics, based on the type and quantity of storage resources consumed.

Configuration Management: At a minimum, this provides the capability to monitor, log and track changes to the storage environment. Ideally, this enables the active configuration of heterogeneous storage arrays and fabric resources from a common console, not just the link and launch of resource element managers.

Change Management: This helps control and manage planned changes to the storage and networking environment, and helps monitor and report all unplanned changes, alerting users when configuration rules have been violated. Some products take snapshots of the storage environment at set intervals so that, in case of a problem, the configuration can be compared with the last-known working state or can be used to generate a bill of materials.

SAN Design and Analysis: This helps create and verify that the layout of the SAN and the configuration of all edge devices have been designed and implemented to compatibility rules.

Provisioning: This is the process of adding, deleting or modifying the capacity of logical unit numbers (LUNs) required for a given application. It follows proper rules for authorization, security, performance and availability, and takes into account storage arrays, network paths and potential replication targets.

Workflow Automation: This enables organizations to automate frequently preformed storage activities (processes) in a way that links to instrumentation and active management capabilities.

Scalability: SRM products should deliver the designed functionality with high availability and adequate performance for large-scale environments. SRM products should be capable of addressing small-, midsize- and large-enterprise environments so that hundreds of storage arrays, thousands of SAN switch ports, and hundreds to thousands of servers can be monitored and managed from a single product.

Integration: The SRM solution should be self-contained and require as few infrastructure components as necessary. The ability to navigate seamlessly across all product features to which the user or role has access rights with a single-sign-on capability is important. Common agents, repositories and consoles for the product are desired.

Ease of Use and Deployment: The time and resources required to deploy and configure the product to the point of delivering useful results to the organization should be commensurate with the scale and scope of the deployment. Modest deployments should be user-installable, with professional services available for more-complex environments. Independent validation of the reported data is essential to benchmark and validate the configuration, and to ensure that it has been correctly calibrated.

Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) adoption continues to increase. Therefore, iSCSI discovery and management should be supported by SRM tools. FCoE adoption is largely nonexistent, but most vendors are planning for FCoE support within the next 18 months. However, road maps and statements of direction should be requested. Support for heterogeneous server platforms should include support for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, VMware and Windows servers.

Products should also support mainstream disk arrays, tape drives and libraries, storage networking devices and NAS filers, as appropriate. Ideally, SRM products should add capacity planning and use-reporting support for virtual-tape-library (VTL) and deduplication products, which are now key solutions in the storage infrastructure. Failure to manage and include VTLs and deduplication solutions in storage dashboards will lead to islands of management that reduce the ability of IT departments to plan upgrades and monitor the effects of a change in one area of the storage infrastructure and its effect on interrelated components.

Included vendors must be the developers of their products, or have made significant functional additions or modifications to the products' codes, not just be pure resellers or VARs. Each company should have at least five enterprises that are using the software in a production environment for which they can provide references to Gartner.

Vendors added

SolarWinds, which purchased Tek-Tools, was added. No other vendors were added to this Magic Quadrant.

Vendors dropped

Quest Software has been dropped since the last SRM Magic Quadrant.

Several factors contribute to the vendors' execution ratings. The product capabilities were evaluated separately for basic and advanced functionality. Special focus was placed on capacity management, change management, policy automation, performance management, integration and root cause analysis. Because this market includes many small vendors with uncertain futures, financial viability was an important factor. Vendors' ability to anticipate and respond to changes in the market and to achieve competitive success when market dynamics change were also highly rated (see Table 1).

Gartner evaluated each vendor's Completeness of Vision, based on its ability to convincingly articulate its future product direction and demonstrate innovation in meeting customer needs, enabling the vendor to more effectively compete in the market. The credibility of the vendor's vision was weighed against its past ability to execute against previously stated plans. Market understanding is the guiding factor in new product development to ensure that the product engineered meets customer needs. Managing the complexity of storage environments requires innovative approaches that will distinguish Leaders and delight customers (see Table 2).

Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable products. They have a proven track record of financial performance and an established market presence. In terms of vision, they are perceived as thought leaders, with well-articulated plans for ease of use, as well as how to address scalability and product breadth. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the expanded market requirements for change management, root cause analysis and performance analysis.

Leaders must not only deliver to current market requirements, which continue to change, but also need to anticipate and deliver on future requirements. A cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how these requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for resource management. As a group, Leaders can be considered a part of most new purchase proposals, and they have high success rates in winning new business.

EMC's revenue decreased for the second year in succession, but it is still in the No. 1 position in terms of revenue. NetApp has improved its sales execution and merged its SANscreen and StorageSuite products, and their added features have helped to significantly increase revenue. IBM has successfully added new features and has continued its bundling program; this has helped IBM to increase sales.

Challengers can execute today, but have limited vision. They have capable products and can perform well for many enterprises. Vendors in this group have the financial and market resources and the capabilities to become Leaders, but the question is whether they have an understanding of the market trends and requirements needed to succeed in the future. In addition, Challengers may not devote sufficient development resources to achieve leadership.

HP is a strong challenger to EMC and IBM, growing customer numbers, but it has not continued to grow revenue. SolarWinds continues to quickly adapt to the market ahead of the competition with hypervisor and iSCSI support and performance management. Northern Parklife continues to grow in Windows environments.

Visionaries are forward-thinking, but their execution has not propelled them into leadership positions. These vendors are differentiated by product innovation, but they have not achieved a completeness of solution or the sales and marketing expertise required to give them the high visibility of leaders.

Aptare has improved its position, as it has consistently invested in its product suite by expanding features and functions. This has also led Aptare to increase its customer numbers. Akorri has improved sales, and improves its position as a Visionary, as it is still the only vendor that offers a simple performance index to indicate the health of a system, and has added support and reporting for Hyper-V systems.

Niche Players are narrowly focused on an application, a market or a product mix, or they offer broad capabilities without the relative success of their competitors in the other quadrants. Niche Players may focus on a segment of the market and do it well, or they may have modest horizons and lower overall capabilities, compared with competitors. Others are simply too new to the market or have fallen behind and, although worth watching, have not yet developed complete functionality or the ability to execute.

The SRM product name is BalancePoint.

• Relatively low acquisition costs, simple and quick agentless installation with low operational management requirements. Good VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V reporting and integration, and increased storage array hardware support.

• Good overall reporting and monitoring, and clear dashboards. Extensive performance reporting and performance index with new virtual machine (VM) network, memory, CPU usage and SAN bottlenecks. New predictive analysis features that enable proactive management and problem avoidance.

• Increased worldwide coverage and positive growth, with the number of BalancePoint customers more than doubling since the 2009 SRM Magic Quadrant.

• Akorri has gained momentum in customer sales over the last 18 months, but still needs to increase its customer base, worldwide channel and route to market.

• Akorri is still a relatively small, privately held company.

• BalancePoint should not be considered if file reporting is required, or as a device configuration or storage-provisioning tool.

The SRM product name is StorageConsole.

• Agentless solution that is simple to install, implement and use, and has low training costs.

• Ability to scale in large environments and comprehensive support for the major OSs, hypervisor platforms and storage devices.

• Provides flexible reporting features for all primary requirements, such as storage management capacity planning, forecasting and application-to-storage tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard.

• Price competitive, compared with many larger holistic SRM solutions.

• Aptare continues to invest in and develop this product, with new file-level reporting and metadata compression technology, SAN discovery, topology configuration display and end-to-end performance reporting.

• Does not perform device configuration or storage provisioning. Decision support, problem determination and reporting only.

• Aptare sells StorageConsole through VARs, with the primary VAR being Hitachi Data Systems.

• Limited support for iSCSI and FCoE storage infrastructures.

The SRM product name is Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM).

• Simple to install and use, graphical user interface (GUI) with helpful wizard guidance features and good Brocade Switch and HBA and converged network adapter (CNA) management. Includes a combined agent that covers Brocade and McData SAN directors and switches.

• Successfully focuses solely on SANs, including FC, FC Internet Protocol (FCIP) and iSCSI; fabric management; SAN encryption and performance monitoring.

• Provides APIs that can be used within scripts to automate repetitive SAN switch management tasks.

• DCFM can successfully scale up to large environments with thousands of switch and device ports. Network Advisor expands network coverage by reporting on NAS, file-based IP storage and converging network management within a single product.

• Not a full SRM offering, only focused on storage networking and SANs.

• Reporting, management and configuration of non-Brocade HBAs and CNAs are not as seamless as with Brocade's own HBAs and CNAs.

The SRM product name is Storage Resource Manager.

• CA Technologies has continued to invest in the open-systems SRM suite, which contains all the features of a broad and holistic SRM product.

• Recent feature upgrades include full data path analysis, performance and utilization reporting, automated exception report creation and distribution, and a Web reporter that enables consolidated custom reporting from multiple management servers in the enterprise.

• The Vantage SRM version provides comprehensive SRM for mainframe environments. 2010 improvements include support for Mainframe 2.0, a new Web-enabled user interface, and improved data summation and reporting.

• Decreasing market share, reduction in customers and market presence, and relatively high purchase costs.

• CA is focused on mainframe markets, and is now passive toward open-system SRM sales.

• CA SRM requires agents, and implementation, management and operational complexity can be higher than newer agentless competitive products.

The core SRM product suite name is EMC Ionix ControlCenter (ECC).

• EMC remains No. 1 in revenue market share for SRM, and is particularly strong in EMC hardware environments, with a comprehensive and holistic SRM tool.

• New EMC ECC capabilities include comprehensive support for virtual provisioning, Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), and end-to-end reporting of EMC virtualization devices (Invista and VPLEX). Other new/updated modules include Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor and Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblocks, and an improved Data Protection Advisor.

• ECC can provide all the features of a holistic SRM tool, from device configuration and SAN configuration to high-level configuration planning advice and change tracking.

• Customer revenue decreased 8.9% over the last year, and there has been a reduction of SRM revenue for three consecutive years, from $487 million in 2007 to $464 million in 2008, to $422 million in 2009.

• ECC still requires agents to provide information about and management of clients.

• Customers must request road maps and direction from the EMC account team concerning the future of ECC, as the product will evolve within the EMC Ionix product family.

• Report generating can be complex and time-consuming. File-level reporting requires large databases and can be difficult to manage.

The SRM product name is Hitachi Storage Command Suite.

• Hitachi Data Systems continues to invest in and develop the product suite with a new version 7 product that has improved scalability and usability, with a redesigned GUI, and a planned increase and focus for heterogeneous storage device support.

• Hitachi Data Systems SRM reporting is targeted at the company's hardware installed base and heterogeneous storage arrays, which are virtualized behind the Universal Storage Platform (USP) V products. Within these environments, the Hitachi Data Systems' products provide the most comprehensive features.

• Provides agentless and comprehensive heterogeneous reporting features by rebranding and using features from the Aptare SRM product.

• Good for configuration and reporting in Hitachi Data Systems storage array environments, and can detect and report thin-provisioned volumes.

• Cannot provide complete integration and reporting on Hitachi Data Systems NAS (HNAS) configurations.

• High acquisition costs in larger environments, but is also willing to offer large discounts; lower-than-average costs in small configurations.

• Most suitable in predominantly Hitachi Data Systems storage array environments.

The SRM product name is Storage Essentials.

• Provides a holistic SRM tool, with all required features and modular purchasing, and installation model. Recent new capabilities include server, SAN, storage virtualization management, support for iSCSI (HP Lefthand) and NAS.

• Storage Essentials has been more closely integrated with other HP management software products, such as Operations Orchestration software, Universal Configuration Management Database, Operations Manager and Server Automation.

• Storage Essentials is still sold as a modular SRM offering, with a relatively lower acquisition cost than competitive products.

• Report creation and consolidation from multiple sites has improved since the 2009 Magic Quadrant. An agentless option is available, but most users still deploy agents.

• HP has increased its Storage Essentials customer base, but this has been achieved with a consequently simultaneous decrease in SRM revenue of approximately 10%, from $59.2 million in 2008 to $51.8 million in 2009.

• Gartner client feedback has wide-ranging views, from extremely useful to an overly complex graphical interface, which should be trialed and investigated for suitability and customer preferences during any product review or test.

• Installation and implementation times can be long and complicated, so it's best if customers and prospects implement only the features required, request references for large heterogeneous implementations and request HP Storage Essentials support for new HP storage products such as the IBRIX-based X9000.

The SRM product name is Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC).

• IBM has systematically invested in and improved the features and functions provided by TPC. It has just introduced in version 4.2, but has not yet market-validated, SAN configuration planning enhancements, new lighter-weight agents and HyperSwap for open systems, as well as a number of integration solutions for specific systems and applications.

• TPC is a full holistic SRM tool that can successfully provide all the primary reporting requirements for IT departments, and can be modularly upgraded to provide sophisticated workflow integration and problem determination features.

• IBM is successfully increasing the number of TPC customers, and growth is outpacing its major competitors. TPC packages like TPC for Disk Midrange Edition for midrange environments are offered at competitive prices, compared with the Enterprise Edition.

• TPC requires agents to manage and report on various target devices, thereby increasing the complexity of installation, implementation and ongoing management. Lightweight agents have improved, but have not resolved this issue.

• Chargeback functionality requires additional IBM products to provide comprehensive and accurate results. This also depends on the ability of the customer to provide sufficient information and understand the costs.

• Pricing ranges from competitive cost-effective starter packs to relatively high-cost acquisition prices in large environments. But IBM is also willing to offer large discounts.

The SRM product suite is called NetApp OnCommand Management Software.

• NetApp has successfully increased revenue by 454% and market share by 4% between 2008 and 2009.

• NetApp has merged StorageSuite and SANscreen into one product line — NetApp OnCommand. This has a higher-level functional naming system called Control, Automate and Analyze (with open APIs that enable integration with data center management tools).

• NetApp continues to invest in and develop the SRM suite with new features and incremental improvements for existing functions.

• Simple-to-use SRM suite and innovative management GUIs and reporting features with clear diagrammatic and topological displays.

• Reports and discovers heterogeneous storage devices, but does not provide heterogeneous device management.

• The new Analyze products will be the only heterogeneous reporting tools, with Control and Automate only supporting NetApp storage appliances.

• NetApp needs to grow its customer base for SANscreen products, as it is not as large as equivalent storage array hardware suppliers that bundle SRM software with storage hardware purchases.

The SRM product name is Northern Storage Suite.

• Expanding number of customers, with a large installed base of over 28,000 customers.

• Successful; concentrates on the Microsoft Windows market and on CIFS storage devices.

• Simple product to install, implement, roll out and manage, leading to low operational costs and improved storage administrator productivity.

• Improved, faster client-scanning architecture and ability to identify files for archiving.

• Northern offers features and functions over and above those provided by the Microsoft Windows OS. However, these basic features can be obtained within Microsoft Windows, albeit with more-complicated and difficult management.

• Storage Suite does not provide holistic SRM features, such as problem determination and device management, but provides reporting, planning, quota/file blocking and chargeback functions.

• Expanding a previously limited worldwide presence via OEM reseller agreements, and only supports CIFS on EMC Celerra and NetApp filers.

The SRM product names are NTP Software QFS, Storage M&A, Storage Financials, ODA and Software File Auditor.

• Continues to successfully grow revenue and customers faster in the niche Microsoft market than SRM vendors in the heterogeneous SRM market segment.

• Improved file agent for faster collection, processing, reporting of file-level information, and support for the NFS protocol.

• Simple installation, low maintenance requirements and advanced centralized policy management.

• Successfully sold via a predominantly indirect channel, with many OEM and resellers providing a large and stable installed base of more than 20,000 customers.

• NTP targets the management of Microsoft Windows servers and the major NAS storage devices from NetApp and EMC, which provides storage for these Microsoft platforms.

• Not a general-purpose or holistic SRM tool for use in heterogeneous environments.

• Customers can obtain the basic information from the Windows OS, but customers requiring more-advanced, policy-based management need to use NTP or similar SRM tools.

The SRM product name is Storage Profiler.

• Gartner client feedback shows that existing customers are satisfied with the acquisition of Tek-Tools by SolarWinds, and there has been no reduction in service or support quality.

• SolarWinds plans to continue investing and growing the SRM business, and plans to move to a totally agentless product. This has been borne out with the release of new functionality and releases during 2010.

• Comparatively large installed base of over 1,000 customers, compared with pure-play SRM reporting competitors, and offers competitive pricing, compared with most holistic and pure-play SRM vendors.

• The Storage Profiler suite will still be sold separately as an SRM tool, and will be integrated into the large SolarWinds product portfolio.

• Still not totally agentless, and may need extra implementation and management resources when requiring the agent-based reporting options.

• No diagrammatic topology display or Microsoft Hyper-V support, but this is planned to be added within the next 12 months.

• Pure-play SRM reporting tool is not a device configuration, high-level workflow or change management tool.

The SRM product name is CommandCentral.

• Symantec CommandCentral managed to maintain market share in a downturn, and increased revenue by 6.3%, to $25.7 million.

• The Symantec sales force is willing to offer significant discounts to maintain business; balance this with the relatively high complexity and cost to deploy.

• Improved integration into the Symantec Altiris system management product suite, enabling workflow and automated provisioning.

• Symantec enhanced the file reporting File SRM product with Data Insight, which provides richer file-level reporting and usage patterns.

• Modest revenue growth, which was mostly gained by expanding in the existing customer base.

• Installation projects can be service-intensive and, therefore, require Symantec professional services, which may be delivered via Symantec channel partners.

• Not totally agentless, but moving to an agentless architecture.

• References and guarantees should be obtained for heterogeneous, detailed device support.