This pent-up demand for better infrastructure insight was illustrated at the recent Storage Networking World conference, when a poll of audience members revealed that 27 percent of them considered SRM their most important concern, while 21 percent cited integration with other management tools as their third-most-pressing issue.

The problem is, it's not happening.

SRM vendors have yet to produce comprehensive products that offer these key capabilities, and as a result, users have been left to assemble their own homegrown best-practice solutions. Unfortunately, these one-off solutions are largely incompatible with commercially available SRM offerings when it comes to developing chargeback models, which remain largely based on allocation.

Making matters worse for users, many companies view this kind of resource mapping as a "nice to have" as opposed to a must-have capability because of the complexity involved with implementing it.

And while the emerging SMI-S management standard is lauded by users and vendors alike for its potential, in the eyes of some experts, when it comes down to building the sophisticated systems required to enable heterogeneous mapping applications, SMI-S is still literally relegated to the bottom of the stack.