MUMBAI, INDIA: Symantec India's director for Systems Engineering, Anand Naik talks with Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about storage with shrinking IT budgets, the complexity in storage space, the role and benefits of storage resource management (SRM) tool for businesses and much more. Excerpts:

In today's digital world, there is incessant data or information growth across IT platforms. While enterprises and businesses invest substantially in storage, at times the storage resources are underused causing organizational inefficiency. What are your views on it?

It is a fact that data will never stop growing, and to manage all this information, Indian enterprises have been allocating over 30 per cent of their annual IT budget to storage servers and technologies. But instead of investing in storage solutions, enterprises need to check as to how much of existing storage is being utilized.

Our recent 'State of the Data Center India' findings revealed enterprises utilize only about 53 per cent of their storage which is as good as paying twice as much for storage needs. Idle capacity consumes power, increases cooling costs, and consumes floor space and maintenance expenditure with absolutely no return on investment (ROI). Therefore the need of the hour remains effective management of storage resources.

Despite shrinking budget storage remains an area of investment for organizations where no compromise is made. In such tight rope kind of situation, do you think organizations and enterprises need to use the storage resource management (SRM) tool?

Storage resource management addresses key IT challenges in managing complex storage environments and enables the IT administrator to see the entire storage network. This flexible view provides administrators the ability to easily manage a growing enterprise storage network and helps them meet storage needs of a diverse and large set of applications across the enterprise.

SRM tools also ensure effective service level agreements by applying quality of service policies throughout the entire data path. Ultimately, storage resource management enables IT to move toward a shared services model, where IT acts as a service provider to its various customers. In this way, IT becomes more transparent, measurable, and aligned with the larger objectives of the business.

How can SRM tool help organizations to deal with the complex issues of storage resources and leverage businesses?

Storage resource management is all about providing a tool set that optimizes management and utilizes existing resources to improve the availability and reliability of business-critical data while lowering the total cost of operations (TCO) of enterprise storage.

The typical SRM solution encompasses a broad range of functionality. These include processes and technologies required for capacity planning, discovery, configuration, monitoring, provisioning, performance and reporting of storage devices and the underlying infrastructure.