Still, for most companies it’s not a question of whether they’ll move to networked storage, but when. "You have to go there," says Sheetz’s Medairy about the network, "because users want to get at that data. But it really changes how you manage storage." For one thing, it’s much more difficult to maintain a storage network without disrupting the users. "Now that we have more applications throughout more business units storing data on different servers on the network, timing becomes harder to deal with," he says. "It’s not a matter of just kicking a few users off the system any more. This affects lots more people."

A Trunkload of Options on the Horizon

For CIOs who are just beginning to evaluate storage with an eye to drawing up a unified plan for the future, some tantalizing new developments are on the horizon. However, they come with a couple of caveats. Not all the tools are in place yet. And standards squabbles between hardware vendors are stalling important interconnectivity projects. Here’s the thing: Users want them. Vendors don’t.

"We’d like to be able to mix and match hardware vendors’ solutions," says Dwight Tart, director of technical services for International Paper at its Memphis, Tenn., operational headquarters. However, he isn’t holding his breath. Even though common information model (CIM), a storage management standard, is being developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association, a standards-making body, standards have become a struggle for supremacy by vendors’ technology strategies. Whoever controls the interface, rules.

In the meantime, there are three technologies to keep an eye on.

Storage resource management (SRM) tools, currently available in early rollouts, keep a bird’s-eye view of storage capacity on the network and allocate more capacity as needed. If the SRM software sees that more storage is needed by the CRM applications, it will locate and re-allocate some unused capacity.

Storage network management (SNM) tools create a map of all the devices on the storage network and monitor for errors, such as network or server failure, automating a manual process.

Storage virtualization software acts as the Adobe Postscript for storage?it fools a variety of proprietary devices into thinking alike, thus vastly increasing interoperability among storage devices.

Enterprise storage management will come into its own when these three technologies can be integrated, says Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Storage Group, a research company in Milford, Mass.

And therein lies the rub. The technologies are in various stages of development, and CIOs can’t count on implementing all of them at once. Brian Lock, MasterCard International’s vice president of architecture development, thinks that SRM technology is going to be robust enough for MasterCard to implement it in the next year or so, whereas the storage virtualization technology, while intriguing, is not quite ready for prime time. "Getting a tool for storage virtualization is a little further out. The companies are newer, and it’s a tricky technology," he says.