Data storage is a big budget item, but a ... Byzantine IT backwater. Few of you will dispute that storage is taking a big slice from your IT budgets. Fewer will claim that managing storage is uppermost in your mind. And fewer still know how much storage capacity different business units are consuming. Those are the contentions of Mark Davis, CEO of CreekPath Systems Inc. in Longmont, Colo. Davis says storage management software has been targeted at storage administrators, leaving IT managers without the necessary tools for analyzing how to best leverage their storage services. He claims that CreekPath's Acuity software, which ships in mid-April, delivers more than 200 reports that can tell you what storage assets you have on your network and who is using how much capacity. It can also identify dependencies within your storage environment so that if you make changes to, say, a storage-area network, you'll know in advance how they will affect your information life-cycle management proc-ess, Davis says.

He observes that identifying storage assets in a multi-vendor environment "is a tough problem." Vendors of disk drives, arrays, volume managers and the rest may claim that they follow standards, but they implement the standards in their own fashion, Davis says. Acuity's agent-free discovery technology alone could make the software useful to you. But the analytics you can apply might prove to be a gold mine for budgeting and for charge-back policies. The software starts at about $80,000.