Walter, For sure it's another interesting battle heating up in SAN Management. Here's a brief outline of some of the issues involved:
There are 2 main components of SAN Management, Network and Storage:
SAN Network management
Controls the interconnect infrastructure - switches, hubs, routers, bridges, HBAs
Traffic flow analysis and management
Error-rate tracking
Focus is on moving data
SAN Storage management
Provides storage services to client applications
Provides attributes of storage service - availability and performance
Focus is on placement and migration of data and access protocols
SAN Storage Management Challenges:
Interoperability - device drivers and operating systems
Manageability - centralization and scaleability
Storage Access Controls - enterprise complexity
Heterogeneous Data Access - consistent management cross-platform, cross-vendor, cross-device
Consistent Device discovery - naming schemes and attributes (MIB)
The current Storage Management Standards movements are circling wagons around their implementations of the following solutions to the immediate needs of the SAN market.
SAN Management Immediate Solutions:
Interoperability within selected cross-vendor solutions - Alliances
Complete discovery services beyond node discovery - development of management protocols and MIBs
Storage visualization tools - development of APIs (Legato, Veritas, etc.)
Network domain management tools - Zoning, NTFS, NFS, SNS, VPNs
Development of the following long-term features will depend largely upon whose standards come to dominate in the above immediate market.
SAN Solutions, Long-term:
Storage resource pools - optical, tapes, drive arrays
Distributed, intelligent storage management - smart agents
Distributed policy management - access control
Resource allocation - quotas
Capacity planning tools
The Fibre Channel hardware companies will have little to do with setting the standards, but will implement the standards of their partners/clients so early associations may prove to be pivotal.
Douglas
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