"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.