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SRM Best Practices
Storage resource management best practices lead to the most efficient, reliable, and cost-effective operations of the enterprise storage stack.
In the best-case scenario, the development of SRM best practices flows as follows:
- Service-level agreement
- Storage best practices
- SRM best practices
However, this flow frequently develops differently when SRM is implemented into a mature, distributed enterprise storage infrastructure:
- SRM system implementation
- Storage discovery process
- Customer resource identification process
- Behavioral classification of customer physical resources
- Service-level agreement
- Storage best practices
- SRM best practices
In either scenario, SRM best practices reflect the storage best practices derived from business service-level agreements.
SRM Best Practices Definitions
Although many organizationally specific operating directives can impact best practices of any kind, storage included, it is still possible to define a basic set of SRM best practices.
Storage resource management systems must:
Monitor all physical enterprise storage resources that are covered within the framework of existing service-level agreements.
Represent these physical resources in logical application or business-function-specific constructs, as required by the storage customer.
- As required, represent physical storage resources within the following
logical groupings:
- Server
- File system
- Database
- Directory
- User
Develop and enforce standard naming conventions for logical groupings.
Provide or feed predictive capacity planning engines for these logical groupings.
Develop customized monitoring configurations, based on service-level agreements.
Monitor and trend logical and physical resources within a grouping to develop baseline behavioral trends.
As defined by service-level agreements, automate processes related to managing the physical resources comprising logical storage constructs in a manner that maximizes value, performance, availability, and reliability of the customer's storage resources.
Automate reporting on customer resources to ensure that customers are informed about their storage behavior.
Provide customers with mechanisms to control consumption where possible and desirable within logical groupings, as defined by service-level agreements.
Application of these basic rules, when implementing an SRM strategy and extending them where necessary within the context of specific service-level agreements, makes the successful realization of the benefits of an SRM system possible.