Storage management software, also known as data storage management software is a special type of program designed for managing storage solutions like storage networks. With storage management software you can get a unified view of managed arrays of the entire data center, virtualization, or the private cloud. Storage management solutions also help backup storage systems and aid in disaster recovery. With storage management software you can perform important services like replication, mirroring, compression, traffic analysis, virtualization, security, and disaster recovery. These types of software are usually sold as value-adding options that are meant to run on servers and manage resources like network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

Furthermore, storage management software is used to optimize storage usage of less important data, or data that doesn’t need high-performance storage. Such data can be moved to cheaper storage options. In this way, storage management software options help businesses make their storage solutions more affordable over a long period of time.

Use of Storage management software

There is versatile use of storage management software. This includes from desktop computers to mainframes and includes products that work on limited or a single set of devices, as well as those that work universally and support a heterogeneous device set. Besides, you can use storage management software for hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems, which back up data from the main storage into slower, less expensive storage devices. The market to which this software belongs is divided into seven segments. Storage management software is the sum of all these segments and represents all the tools that are needed to manage the performance, capacity, and availability of the data stored on disks or any storage device attached to the system.

Key features of storage management software

• Storage monitoring

This is an essential feature of storage management software that provides it the capability of monitoring. While monitoring is the foundation of effective management, it allows IT professionals to keep an eye on the overall health of their storage environments and their data. Also, it alerts administrators when things go wrong.

• Reporting and analytics

Storage management software offers reporting functionality that allows administrators to see how their storage systems and overall environments are performing over time. With the growing amount of big data, IT managers can make informed decisions about how best to administer their existing storage resources and appropriately prepare for capacity upgrades, data migrations, and other changes using the reporting capability of storage management software. As a result, it helps to improve application performance, improve service levels and maximize capacity.

• Unified management

Many vendors offer administrators a unified view of all their storage resources and services, which enable them to access and control storage systems across an entire enterprise. It helps them to consolidate configuration, monitoring, and reporting tools into a single interface. This approach not only helps eliminate storage silos but also provides a consistent and predictable user experience compared to juggling a multitude of disparate tools.

• Storage Optimization

Apart from monitoring, reporting, and basic data placement tools, many vendors have storage-optimization features in their management software. For example, it’s increasingly common to see data deduplication listed as part of an offering. As the term suggests, data deduplication is a technology that allows organizations to pack more data onto their storage arrays and backup stores by eliminating duplicate data.

How to decide which storage software is right for your needs

It all depends on your priorities. Consider these key points as you select storage management software:

Big Data: Dealing with big data? Again, data deduplication and compression features will help organizations to obtain more storage space out of their arrays. But these days, administrators need to do much more than make room to accommodate big data. The data should be available to databases and big data processing systems that power an organization’s business intelligence and analytics applications. This requires big data storage management products that are up to the task.

Flash: The arrival of flash-enabled storage systems means that applications and high-volume transaction systems are faster and more responsive than ever. Of course, this comes at a price premium compared to traditional, disk-based systems.

To ensure that expensive all-flash and hybrid-flash systems are used to their full potential, administrators rely on storage-tiering technologies to help ensure that only the most critical or important data takes up this expensive form of storage capacity. Look for solutions that can be configured to automatically place data on the appropriate storage medium (SSDs, HDDs, and tape) depending on an organization’s performance, price, and capacity requirements.

Double backup: Data protection is another important consideration, and rightly so. Keeping a single copy of a file, database, or application data is a surefire way to court disaster. Although backup software solutions are often in a category of their own, some vendors incorporate enterprise backup and recovery management capabilities into their general storage management products or at least provide monitoring and analytics capabilities that span their production and backup storage systems and services.

Cloud Storage: The cloud has opened up new enterprise storage opportunities, but they come with their share of challenges. Look for a cloud-aware management solution that not only provides visibility into your cloud storage subscriptions and the data within them but also enables you to monitor and control them without jumping through additional hoops.

Virtualization: Running VMware or another virtualization platform? Many solutions, particularly those from Dell EMC, VMware’s parent company, feature integrations that provide administrators better visibility and more granular controls, helping them meet the demands that virtual application servers place on an organization’s networked storage systems.

Mixed environments: Heterogeneous storage environments pose another challenge. A merger or acquisition can mean inheriting a storage infrastructure based on another vendor’s hardware and software solutions. Apart from a prohibitively costly migration, establishing a unified storage management environment may involve investing in a third-party solution. Interoperable: Be forewarned. As previously discussed, a storage vendor’s native software solutions generally work best with its own hardware. Although many vendors have claimed to embrace open standards and a spirit of “coopetition,”