Managing all or most of your storage resources from a "single pane of glass" has been the Holy Grail of storage management, but the vision remains largely unrealized. For a variety of reasons, storage resource management (SRM) tools aren't engineered to deliver complex, multistep services such as storage provisioning, data migration and performance optimization across heterogeneous storage devices. They're also unable to coordinate the numerous people required to complete these tasks. When IT process automation is applied to storage management, it begins to address the issue of linking complex processes with multiple independent tools and automating some of the more rudimentary activities.

IT process automation tools provide a workflow that guides the storage administrator through the process. The real value is when these workflow engines are integrated with storage management apps to provide storage admins with information to make intelligent decisions and automate some of the more basic tasks.