Magic Quadrant for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00168258, Valdis Filks, Robert E. Passmore, 22 June 2009

SRM and storage area network tools enable customers to manage their shared-storage environments. Theyve become fully featured, integrated and user-friendly products. Vendors offer holistic to specialist solutions to customers with a broad range of maturity levels and requirements.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
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. Combined with the continuous growth in customer demand for storage capacity and the additional operational costs of storage management, the requirement for SRM tools has grown. SRM tools are mandatory for the effective management of shared-storage environments; however, the breadth of features, ease of use of SRM tools and product integration within the suites has improved. Implementation times and support overheads have been reduced by agentless offerings. Niche vendors maintain their value by offering solutions for functions not addressed by general-purpose products and by providing lower-cost alternatives, when only a portion of the SRM functionality is required. Gartner believes that the SRM market will segment into two product categories that mirror customer maturity, installed storage capacity and complexity. The first will consist of between three and five major SRM vendors that will have holistic and comprehensive SRM products used in large, mature storage-heterogeneous enterprises. The second 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. Since the last Magic Quadrant, the major vendors CA, EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NetApp and Symantec have integrated their diverse modules into SRM suites that now have a consistent look and feel within their solutions. All have significantly improved functionality through service packs or point releases. 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 of the SAN. Other niche 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.

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Aptare and Quest concentrate on the core storage management features of providing storage management dashboards, capacity planning, storage reclamation and storage utilization reporting from the application level to the storage device. Akorri and Tek-Tools address storage performance monitoring and modeling in addition to the core storage management features outlined above. Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software

challengers

leaders

ability to execute

These specialist vendors do not offer workflow and storage-provisioning features, leaving device management to the tools supplied with the storage devices. Breakthrough features and technologies, such as change management, problem determination and root-cause analysis, which were relatively new and immature in the last Magic Quadrant, have now improved and are common in the comprehensive SRM solutions from the major vendors. During the past six to 12 months, the ability to report and correlate storage used by server virtualization solutions and hypervisors was added to most SRM products. This is a significant requirement recognized by the SRM vendors, because server virtualization solutions and projects often reduced storage visibility, management, utilization and subsequently increased storage costs. Therefore, customers demanded hypervisor support from their SRM vendors to reduce costs by improving storage manageability and use in virtualized server environments.

HP Northern Parklife Tek-Tools

IBM

EMC

Symantec NetApp

NTP Software Hitachi Data Systems CA Brocade Akorri Aptare Quest Software

niche players

visionaries

completeness of vision
Source: Gartner (June 2009)

As of June 2009

Although many customers have gained large cost savings by implementing SRM tools, most IT departments still focus on hardware solutions and innovations, rather than SRM processes to improve storage management and contain costs. Organizations or support groups in IT departments often create and support their own manual and labor-intensive ecosystem of scripts and spreadsheet-based SRM reports. Thus, SRM is performed informally and sporadically, as required, on a best-effort basis, but the value of purchasing an SRM tool and formalizing these processes is often not recognized, because the in-house processes are deemed sufficient.

To remove the concerns and issues surrounding lengthy SRM implementation and installation projects together with the added complexity of agent-based solutions (such as agent management) the major vendors are slowly implementing or providing statements of direction to provide agentless SRM solutions. The smaller vendors (e.g., Akorri, Aptare, Tek-Tools and Quest) have been quicker to adapt in this space, by having predominantly agentless solutions and enabling simpler and faster implementation times. However, due to security and firewall considerations, agentless SRM solutions may still require changes to the infrastructure and do not guarantee a problem-free implementation.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted June 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartners analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the Leaders quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 2009 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartners research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

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From the early days of SRM, the requirements and expectations of SRM tools expanded unrealistically. SRM solutions were positioned and expected to solve and manage all storage management issues from problem determination, device management, provisioning, change management, workflow management, capacity planning and even provide advisory capabilities. The expectations were set too high, and the requirements were too broad. Many vendors have chosen to stop developing device management tools and no longer provide device management tools for heterogeneous devices; instead, they use their SRM products to launch the specific vendors device management tool. This shows that, if required, detailed device management and tuning is still best performed by the specific hardware devices management tool. However, the daily tasks of high-level provisioning and the automated provisioning of storage can be successfully accomplished at a higher level via the comprehensive management tools. Since the last Magic Quadrant, there has been no change in the requirement for professional services. Agentless SRM solutions still require implementation assistance to configure repositories and customize reports; however, in most cases, the time to implement will be less than with agent-based solutions. Overall, independent of the vendor, large-scale enterprise deployments typically require professional services to install and configure a solution to the unique requirements of the customer. To reduce this requirement, 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. $711 million in 2013. Since the last Magic Quadrant, all the major vendors CA, EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NetApp and Symantec have released new and improved versions of their SRM products. The largest increases in SRM sales revenue are typically from the hardware vendors, which successfully bundle their SRM solutions with hardware. Niche vendors are holding their own; however, theyre too small to affect the overall market. Nevertheless, some small vendors are demonstrating solid traction, and new vendors continue to be attracted to this segment. In terms of revenue, EMC has the largest market share, with $464 million in 2008. However, its growth declined by 4.8% ($23 million) from 2007. IBM, which has the second-largest share of the SRM market grew its revenue by 18% ($14 million) to $95 million in 2008. HPs grew its revenue by 61% ($23 million) to $59 million in 2008. NetApp grew the most, increasing its revenue by 454% ($27 million) to $32 million. Symantec grew revenue by 7.8% ($1.7 million) to $23 million, and CA was stable, with $11 million revenue in 2008. The remaining vendors, grouped together, grew by 4% ($2 million) to $39 million in revenue in 2008. The SRM market continues to adapt, with vendors repackaging their products into base and/or starter packages that provide the fundamental SRM features. 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. There have been several acquisitions and partnerships in the market since the last Magic Quadrant. The most significant has been NetApps acquisition of Onaro, which enabled the creation of a comprehensive SRM solution. In addition, Quest acquired the assets of Monosphere, which will be incorporated into a wider system management suite that includes SRM. In addition, Hitachi Data Systems has partnered with Aptare, reselling its product as the Storage Capacity Reporter. The major changes in the SRM marketplace are in the areas of customer use requirements and pricing. Fewer customers are purchasing or requesting SRM tools specifically to manage storage devices; most tasks can still be performed at the higher provisioning level; however, tuning and problem determination are most often done by using the more precise and specific device managers. Vendors have adapted to this by launching the specific device management tools from their products, thereby maintaining the illusion that device management is incorporated in their SRM products. For the major SRM vendors, this has reduced R&D costs in storage device management, enabling them to invest in higherlevel management tools. Similarly, for new entrants into the SRM market and for the specialist SRM vendors, less money is being spent to develop device management tools, which lowers the cost of entry into this market. To reduce the initial purchase cost for customers, the comprehensive SRM vendors have created base and starter packages that are functionally similar to products from the specialist vendors, but at lower prices than the full SRM products. However, due to complexity of installation, many solutions still require professional services (at extra cost) to implement SRM solutions. This extra cost has inhibited SRM adoption, and, therefore, most vendors now offer or plan to offer agentless solutions to reduce this inhibitor and time and cost of implementation.

STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S)

The SRM market will segment into two product categories that mirror customer maturity, installed storage capacity and complexity, and will consist of large SRM vendors with comprehensive products, as well as specialist SRM vendors that offer niche or fundamental storage monitoring and reporting facilities.

MAGIC QUADRANT
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. This was the case for CA and Hitachi Data Systems, which have moved incrementally forward, but not as rapidly as the rest of the market. A vendors position on the Magic Quadrant should not be equated with its products attractiveness or suitability for every clients requirements. If the solutions better fit your needs, have the appropriate support capabilities and are attractively priced, then it is perfectly acceptable to acquire solutions from vendors that are not in the Leaders quadrant.

Market Overview
The distributed systems (nonmainframe) SRM segment, which includes SAN management software, grew by 6.4% (from $681 million in 2007 to $725 million in 2008). However, because of the global economic climate, the SRM market is forecast to decline at a compound annual growth rate of 0.5%, taking the segment to

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Although product features and functions have improved since the last Magic Quadrant, the market has not expanded significantly. The SRM market has experienced modest revenue growth (6.4%) during the past two years for several reasons: IT departments expected and depended on technology and hardware solutions, rather than management processes, to reduce storage costs. Less emphasis was placed on efficient storage management during the positive economic climate between 2002 and 2008. From October 2008 to May 2009, Gartner noticed an increase in customer SRM inquiries and a growing interest in cost optimization. Therefore, cost-cutting measures in the present economic climate may concentrate an IT managers mind on implementing storage management processes. This may change the emphasis from hardware solutions to improved management processes, thereby accelerating the adoption of SRM tools, which are used to manage and monitor storage more efficiently, increase use and reclaim capacity, rather than continually purchasing more hardware. The basic features that help organizations reduce costs (such as use reporting, dashboards and storage reclamation) are available in most of the products. There are contradictory SRM purchasing and usage patterns in the market. Customers often implement SRM tools to manage their storage environments, but not to configure the individual devices or elements in their storage infrastructures. Although its common for IT hosting and outsourcing suppliers to standardize on SRM tools to provide provisioning and element management functions to gain economies of scale and to simplify operations, few mainstream customers manage to implement all of these high-level processes, 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. Mature enterprise customers with formalized IT management processes typically prefer comprehensive SRM solutions from the major vendors. These process-oriented customers are more likely to implement the SRM workflow and provisioning features to standardize on one management methodology. An alternative and contradictory SRM deployment methodology is to use tools from hardware vendors for device management and provisioning, and to use specialist SRM vendor products to perform storage reclamation, simple discovery, reporting and planning tasks, such as use-tracking and capacity-planning solutions to track how storage expenditure and assets are being used. These niche solutions can be implemented quickly with smaller budgets and environments. Most of these customer types have determined that effective storage management is better accomplished by several, potentially overlapping, point products or options. An example is customers using SAN and array element managers from the original device vendors and management and reporting tools from the specialist SRM vendors. 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, use monitoring and topology mapping. The differences between usage patterns and customer requirements will drive market segmentation and maintain the distinction between major and specialist SRM vendors. Major and specialist vendors will both survive in this market.

Market Definition/Description
SRM products provide data collection and automation agents that consolidate and operate on information from multiple platforms supporting storage management tools on multiple operating systems (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 the SRM product 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 Webbased and provides a way to view storage resources and metrics, based on a users profile and credentials. The products 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 opensource available 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

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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, host bus adapter (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 eliminate 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 monitor and report on 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 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 morecomplex environments. Independent validation of the reported data is essential to benchmark to validate the configuration and ensure that it has been correctly calibrated. Since the last Magic Quadrant, Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) adoption has significantly increased. Therefore, iSCSI discovery and management should be supported by SRM tools. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is still new, and no SRM solutions support FCoE. However, road maps and statements of direction should be requested. Support for heterogeneous server platforms should include support for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Windows and NetWare servers. Products should also support the mainstream disk arrays, tape drives and libraries, storage networking devices and NAS filers, as appropriate. Ideally, SRM products should also add capacityplanning 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.

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Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
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 value-added resellers (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.

Completeness of Vision
Gartner evaluated each vendors 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 vendors 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).

Added
Aptare and Quest have been added to this years Magic Quadrant. In addition to Hitachi Data Systems reselling HPs SRM product, with the Hitachi Storage Management Software Suite, Hitachi Data Systems now uses Aptare to provide SRM capacity-reporting capabilities.

Leaders
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 the current market requirements, which continue to change, they 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. EMCs ControlCenter v.6.1 incorporated improved integration between products, user experience and it has been successfully bundled and sold with EMC storage arrays putting it in the No 1 position in terms of revenue. IBM continues to increase sales of its

Dropped
Onaro has been removed, because it was acquired by NetApp in 2008. Estorian and Teracloud were dropped from this years Magic Quadrant, because they were below the threshold of criteria for inclusion.

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
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).

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria Evaluation Criteria Product/Service Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) Sales Execution/Pricing Market Responsiveness and Track Record Marketing Execution Customer Experience Operations Source: Gartner (June 2009) Weighting standard standard high high standard high low

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria Evaluation Criteria Market Understanding Marketing Strategy Sales Strategy Offering (Product) Strategy Business Model Vertical/Industry Strategy Innovation Geographic Strategy Source: Gartner (June 2009) Weighting high standard standard high standard standard high low

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TotalStorage Productivity Center SRM by adding new features and successfully continuing its bundling program, which has created upsell opportunities. Symantec has added many new features to its product and adapted pricing to simplify CommandCentral purchasing.

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Akorri
The SRM product name is BalancePoint. Strengths Agentless architecture and good VMware support, which can diagnose the storage performance implications of multiple physical or virtual hosts. Provides performance analysis for iSCSI, NFS, Fibre Channel SAN switches, HBAs and individual port statistics. Resold by Dell and EMC to provide storage performance management tool in a virtualized and physical environment. Provides an application view of storage performance that comprehends the application, OS, networking and storage domains and produces performance and use metrics, such as the Performance Index, which is a score of how well the infrastructure is being used by each application. Generic modeling capability with preconfigured templates for several data types, enabling performance monitoring of standard and custom applications; can be part of a capacityprovisioning strategy that assigns LUNs based on potential performance effects. Cautions Varied display format between topology views and reports; easy-to-view, Web-based topology views, but with scorecard reports displayed in a different format. BalancePoint is not a full SRM solution if device and SAN management, workflow management, provisioning and device root-cause analysis are required. Limited ability to link and integrate with other management solutions. No roll-up across multiple BalancePoint instances. Scalability is claimed at as many as 800 servers per solution, but clients need to investigate this.

Challengers
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, because it has improved its Storage Essentials suite and continues to grow its market share. Tek-Tools continues to quickly adapt to the market ahead of the competition with hypervisor, and iSCSI support and performance management. Northern Parklife continues grow in Windows environments.

Visionaries
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. NetApp has improved its position significantly due to the Onaro acquisition and the ongoing investment in and development of SANscreen. However, even with accelerated improvements in revenue and market share, it still lags behind the leaders in terms of customer adoption and revenue. Akorri has become a visionary by offering a simple performance index to indicate the health of a system.

Niche Players
Niche players are narrowly focused on an application, market or 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. Aptare is in the niche segment because it is a new entrant in the SRM market. It has a quickly expanding set of features with Storage Console, and Capacity Manager has good initial adoption and a major OEM agreement with Hitachi Data Systems. Although Backup Manager is an established and well-respected product, the newer Virtualization Manager and Replication Manager products will need to prove themselves in the market.

Aptare
The SRM product name is Storage Console. Strengths Provides all fundamental storage management capacity planning, forecasting and application-to-storage tracking via graphical reports and a comprehensive dashboard; optional integration with backup reporting, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp replication management.

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Agentless solution offers nonintrusive deployment with a potentially faster return on investment. Good sales ramp-up for a new product and OEM adoption by Hitachi Data Systems into its SRM suite as Storage Capacity Reporter. Web 2.0 architecture enables partners to deliver StorageConsole as a software-as-a-service solution and provides the capability to view the storage status dashboard from mobile phones. Broad support for the major OSs, hypervisor platforms and storage devices. Cautions Capacity Manager is a new to market and has yet to prove itself with continued growth and customer validation. OEM partners are currently limited to Hitachi Data Systems, providing a significant revenue stream. Not a full SRM solution if device and SAN management, workflow management, provisioning, performance monitoring and device root-cause analysis are required.

CA
The SRM product name is Storage Resource Manager. Strengths CA continues to offer a comprehensive open system and a mainframe SRM portfolio that provides broad platform support (OSs, applications, fabric devices and storage arrays). Common SRM graphical user interface (GUI) across mainframe and open systems; the mainframe console is a unique differentiator. Broad legacy platform support for mainframe and Novell, newer iSCSI protocols, VMware and broad Linux distribution support. Most licenses are obtained as a part of an overarching corporate license agreement. Cautions Significantly reduced visibility, because of a reorganization that has removed emphasis from storage as a separate area. Multiple consoles and agents are required to manage and monitor the storage infrastructure. No built-in roll-up facility for multiple CA SRM product instances and inability to generate combined reports across mainframe and open systems. Dependent on the niche mainframe market and targeting a limited market segment of high-end, large-enterprise customers with mainframes. No increase in SRM revenue growth between 2007 and 2008.

Brocade
The SRM product name is Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM). Strengths Continues to focus solely but successfully on SAN, including Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel Internet Protocol (FCIP) and iSCSI; fabric management; and performance monitoring. More-comprehensive alternative to switch element managers from the holistic SRM tools. Scalable solution with comprehensive SAN design capabilities that can manage more than 9,000 switch ports. Provides FCoE management support for new Brocade FC/ FCoE SAN switches. More than 12,000 product installations with a large ecosystem of 18 OEMs. Cautions Not a full SRM offering, only focused on storage networking and SANs. The large installed base of Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager (EFCM) and Fabric Manager (FM) customers will need to migrate to DCFM, which will incorporate new device/switch support and all new features (e.g., FCoE, encryption, DCX-4S Backbone switch), because DCFM is the strategic long-term product.

EMC
The SRM product name is ControlCenter. Strengths The latest 6.x versions have largely solved the issues of module integration and ease of use, and they provide a common GUI across the suite. Provides OS support and broad feature set enabling storage administrators to perform most storage management tasks from daily-use reporting and dashboards to long-term planning, SAN design/validation, root-cause analysis and problem determination. Comprehensive, reporting, integration and early support for EMC storage products and VMware solutions. File-level classification and reporting via ControlCenter and policy-based data migration via the RAINfinity offering.

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Successful sales execution and product bundling give ControlCenter the highest SRM product revenue and market share in the distributed, open-system SRM market. Cautions High-value options that provide SAN modeling, root-cause analysis and automated provisioning lag behind the adoption of the base products. Large deployments can be lengthy, and data collection and storage management is mainly provided by agents requiring installation and monitoring. However, an agentless architecture is promised. Reporting for tape/virtual tape, deduplication and non-EMC storage arrays other than NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems enterprise systems is limited. SRM revenue has decreased by 4.8%, and market share has decreased 7.5% between 2007 and 2008. Cautions The three market offerings are not integrated together as a single product. The modules from Aptare do not represent a complete SRM capability if device and SAN management, workflow management, provisioning, performance monitoring and device root-cause analysis are required. Hitachi Data Systems has been slower than other vendors to support VMware integration with SRM.

HP
The SRM product name is Storage Essentials. Strengths Comprehensive open-system SRM portfolio that provides broad platform support (OSs, application, fabric devices and storage arrays). Since the last Magic Quadrant, Storage Essentials has been updated to a more-flexible reporting tool, support has been added for VMware and Polyserve, an orchestration/automation tool has been included and scalability has been improved. All product features are fully integrated into a unified console and are relatively easy to use, compared with other comprehensive SRM solutions. Storage Essentials is integrated with HPs Systems Insight Manager tools for managing servers and applications. Increase of 61.2% in SRM revenue and a 2.8% increase in market share between 2007 and 2008. Cautions Other products are more comprehensive in SAN management and NAS support. No EMC NAS support and no root-cause capability. Large-enterprise customers should seek references of similarly sized installations to address concerns regarding product scalability and long implementation times.

Hitachi Data Systems

The SRM product name is Hitachi Storage Command Suite. Strengths Hitachi Data Systems primary investment into SRM, using its own intellectual property, is targeted at heterogeneous storage environments that are fully virtualized behind Hitachi USP series storage. Hitachi Storage Command Suite v.6.1 is a comprehensive SRM suite providing most of the features and functions required by mature IT departments that require the full breadth of SRM functions for this USP-based hardware environment. For mixed-vendor environments not virtualized behind the USP-V, Hitachi Storage Services Manager, based on an OEM relationship with HP, delivers a heterogeneous SRM console based on the SMI-S industry standard for discovery, policybased monitoring, reporting and path provisioning. For environments restricted from installing host-based agents that dont need full SRM functionality, Hitachi Data Systems now OEMs two modules from Aptare, which are sold as Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter and Hitachi Virtual Server Reporter. These deliver storage capacity reporting end-to-end from applications to heterogeneous storage systems at lower costs. Hitachi Data Systems showed low-double-digit growth in 2008 for SRM revenue; it is most successful in the virtualized behind USP series customer base. The suite is viewed by users as affordable and highly configurable. It is easy to deploy, has agentless features in the capacity manager module, and it has detailed and customizable reporting and monitoring tools that provide sufficient metrics for most planning activities.

IBM
The SRM product name is Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Strengths Comprehensive open-system SRM portfolio that provides broad platform support (OSs, application, fabric devices and storage arrays) that is relatively easy to use and deploy, compared with other comprehensive SRM solutions.

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Since the last Magic Quadrant, IBM has added a custom reporting tool, lightweight agents, single sign-on, disaster recovery management, and a performance analysis/ management tool for IBM and EMC hardware environments. Also added were enhancements for heterogeneous storage environments and dynamic performance optimization. All product features are fully integrated into a unified console that handles the challenges of displaying large-scale environments. Second-largest installed base of the comprehensive SRM suites. Revenue increase of 18.1% and a 1.3% increase in market share between 2007 and 2008. Cautions Lacks iSCSI support, while selling iSCSI-compliant products. Limited chargeback, backup reporting and root-cause error log correlation and analysis capabilities. According to Gartner clients, large-scale implementations can be lengthy; references for environments larger than 5,000 switch ports should be obtained. Cautions SANScreen provides most of features found in the holistic enterprise SRM solutions, but lacks features such as complete file-level data. StorageSuite file reporting does not work outside of the NetApp hardware environment. NetApp specific tools lack a built-in roll-up facility for multiple management products.

Northern Parklife
SRM product name is Northern Storage Suite. Strengths Continues to successfully focus solely on Microsofts CIFS and Windows storage management via quotas, reporting to file level, chargeback, and automated or event-driven actions. Context-specific online help and best-practice guides with policy-based recommendations added as part of the base product. Out-of-band content scan capability to filter or block files based on actual data, not just file name and file type. More than 30,000 product installations. Resold by EMC, Fujitsu, HP/EDS, IBM and Hitachi in Japan. Cautions Support for CIFS only on EMC Celerra and NetApp filers. Not a full SRM and SAN management offering; predominantly provides reporting, chargeback and file blocking/allocation control. Limited product internationalization (English and Japanese). Customers may use native Windows quota reporting and management in future versions of Windows OSs, rather than purchase a separate product.

NetApp
SRM product names are SANscreen and Storage Suite. Strengths Onaro acquisition has been successfully integrated; go to market has delivered strong triple-digit growth of SANscreen revenue. SANscreen provides an agentless solution for heterogeneous storage environments that has proved to scale in some of the worlds largest SAN environments. Building on its original strong root-cause and change management capabilities. NetApp has added capacity planning, workflow tools, heterogeneous NAS and iSCSI support, and a global roll-up capability. NetApp also offers comprehensive SRM capabilities specific to the NetApp platform. These are known for ease of deployment and use, as well as for robust application integration, including Exchange, Oracle, SQL Server and SAP. User and application server tools control snapshot recovery and policies. Revenue increased by 454%, and market share increased 3.6% between 2007 and 2008.

NTP Software
The SRM product names are QFS, Storage M&A, Storage Financials and ODA. Strengths New dashboard improving usability and online reporting. Integration with Symantec Enterprise vault with the ODA option, which enables user-driven or quota-driven archiving.

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Content scan capability to filter or block files based on actual data; able to search within zip files, in addition to file name and file type. Long-term, proven NetApp integration with q-tree support and partial roll-up capability for expanded deployments. Large, stable installed base of more than 20,000 customers; continues to successfully focus on file (NAS)-based Windows client/server, NetApp and EMC quota (hard and soft) management and reporting. Cautions Customers may use native Windows quota reporting and management in future versions of Windows OSs, rather than purchase a separate product; this will reduce the requirement for third-party quota management products. Not a full SRM and SAN management offering. Still has limited product internationalization. Storage Horizon is not a full SRM and SAN management product, if workflow management, provisioning and device rootcause analysis is required.

Symantec
The SRM product name is CommandCentral. Strengths One of the best-scaling SRM products and a comprehensive open-system SRM portfolio that provides broad platform support (OSs, application, fabric devices and storage arrays). Since the last Magic Quadrant, Symantec has added a custom report module, support for VMware, support for IBM SVC and Hitachi Data Systems USP, enhanced support for multiple vendors replication, improved scalability, a change management capability, agentless operation for change/ capacity management, and an advisor for disaster recovery configurations. Robust workflow engine and heterogeneous backup reporting module; each is available separately. Increase of 7.8% in revenue and stable market share between 2007 and 2008. Cautions No agentless file reporting, EMC NAS support or detailed root cause capability. According to our clients, large-scale implementations can be lengthy; references for environments larger than 5,000 switch ports should be obtained. Service-intensive deployment. Modest penetration, when compared with the overall Veritasheritage installed base.

Quest Software
SRM product name is Storage Horizon. Strengths Provides all fundamental storage management capacity planning, use reporting, forecasting and application to storage tracking via graphical reports and a comprehensive dashboard. Ability to interrogate and report on the internals/back end of NetApp filer storage utilization. A few large installations prove product scalability and chargeback functionality when implemented with Professional Services support. The acquisition of Monosphere IP by Quest and promised increased investment, product development and planned integration with Quests Vizioncore and Foglight solutions may improve market adoption. Positive initial customer reaction to Quest takeover, with no reduction in support capabilities. Cautions Slow market adoption and sales growth prior to Quest acquisition. Large enterprises will want to seek references of similar size and complexity.

Tek-Tools
The SRM product is Storage Profiler. Strengths Large customer base with more than 1,300 customers and reseller agreements with Dell, Glasshouse, LSI, Quantum and Sun. Detailed reporting and discovery for iSCSI in Windows and VMware environments, in addition to established FC and NAS protocols.

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Extensive storage array and appliance support. Optional backup and tape chargeback reporting module, with support for major backup and restore products. Competitive pricing for this market segment. Successfully in the business for more than a decade, with a recent history of strong sales growth. Cautions Large enterprises will want references of similar size and complexity. Not totally agentless reporting and monitoring can be achieved without agents; however, agents are required to gather performance data in non-VMware environments and for in-depth data collection on some devices. If workflow management, provisioning and device root-cause fault analysis are required, Profiler is not a full SRM and SAN management product. Small, private company.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

CIFS DCFM ECC EFCM FC FCoE FCIP FM GUI HBA iSCSI LOB LUN NAS NFS OS SAN SRM VAR VTL Common Internet File System Data Center Fabric Manager EMC ControlCenter Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager Fibre Channel Fibre Channel over Ethernet Fibre Channel Internet Protocol Fabric Manager graphical user interface host bus adapter Internet Small Computer System Interface line of business logical unit number network-attached storage Network File System operating system storage area network storage resource management value-added reseller virtual tape library

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

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Evaluation Criteria Definitions Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc., whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria. Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an assessment of the overall organizations financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood of the individual business unit to continue investing in the product, to continue offering the product and to advance the state of the art within the organizations portfolio of products. Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendors capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendors history of responsiveness. Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organizations message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This mind share can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities. Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc. Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision. Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the Web site, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements. Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling product that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base. Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendors approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements. Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendors underlying business proposition. Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendors strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals. Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes. Geographic Strategy: The vendors strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the home or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.