HP readies new storage management suite
By Sonia R. Lelii, eWEEK
March 9, 2001 12:44 PM ET
When it comes to heterogeneous storage, Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking the lone ranger approach.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company next month will release a software family designed to give IT administrators the ability to consolidate disparate storage systems under one management console -- regardless of the hardware the storage resides on.
But while companies like Compaq Computer Corp. and IBM work together to develop the software fabric for hetero-geneous storage, HP is going at it alone with what it calls the HP Federated Storage Area Management strategy.
"Compaq did not have a high-end and IBM did not have a midrange [storage product]," said Nora Denzel, HP's vice president and general manager for network storage solutions. "Theirs was a marriage of convenience. They did what made sense to them. We did not have that problem."
HP has developed a group of software pieces that will be leveraged under the OpenView brand to do topology discovery, provide charts on performance utilization and deliver reports that gauge storage capacity. HP officials say that more than 80 percent of their customers' storage is direct-attached -- meaning it is tied to a server as opposed to a centrally located disk array.
Centralizing storage is key to customers looking for efficiency and savings, HP officials said. One of HP's software layers is called the OpenView Storage Node Manager, which gives IT managers a topology map of the storage devices and signals the health of the systems. Another, the OpenView Storage Optimizer, helps manage performance by providing charts and graphs that measure performance in real-time and historically. And the OpenView Storage Builder focuses on managing storage capacity, whether at the department level or by specific users.
"For the Storage Service Provider market, this mechanism is really important," said Magdy Assem, HP's marketing manager for scalable network storage.
Another piece is the OpenView Storage Allocator, which enables customers to allocate LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) to specific hosts.
"You can connect LUNs to hosts dynamically without rebooting the system," Assem said.
All of the products are expected to ship in April.
Also in April HP will release the Network Storage Appliance, which will have both storage area network and network-attached storage capabilities, officials said.
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Eaton Gets Storage-Network Help From Veritas
Being an early adopter is hard. That isn't stopping Jeff Goldstein at Eaton Corp. from vacationing far from his wintry headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. He's in Fort Myers, Fla., this week because he and his team got some storage consulting from an unlikely source.
Eaton's storage network is up and running securely and reliably this week, Goldstein says, thanks to help the $9 billion manufacturer is getting from Veritas Software Corp. The software vendor will unveil updates to its line of storage-network-management products. Goldstein is considering the storage products, and he already uses some Veritas software for things like backup and recovery. But it's Veritas' new SANPoint Consulting unit that let him get away. The software decision can wait.
According to Goldstein, Eaton had the beginnings of storage virtualization (where information can flow throughout a network without being tied to any one hardware device) and backup and recovery going on a storage network early last year. "But then we dropped jobs during backup and recovery, and other jobs were getting multiple addresses when they were only supposed to have one," he says. "By summer, we weren't comfortable moving ahead anymore."
The Eaton storage network encompasses technology from Brocade, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, StorageTek, and Sun. "The vendors don't play together like they should," says Goldstein, "and standards aren't developed yet."
Veritas presented Eaton with three designs for its storage network, with the most expensive design coming with the highest levels of scalability and availability. Goldstein chose the middle package, and Veritas showed him how to create eight-port switches as hubs between servers, storage, and other back-end switches to improve scalability. The Veritas consultants also told him how to upgrade the Brocade switches to improve information availability.
Most important, Veritas SANPoint consulting, according to Goldstein, let him cut some hardware costs in half. "And we can reduce the amount of our people who have to muck with the storage," says Goldstein, "by 30% to 40%." He says he plans to increase the 8-terabyte storage network to 16-terabytes by year's end. Eaton has spent $250,000 on storage-network hardware so far, and plans to spend $50,000 to $60,000 in additional hardware.
Industry analyst Dennis Martin at Evaluator Group Inc. thinks that software-maker Veritas knows as much as any consulting company about storage networks and they have a big advantage because they're hardware independent. "I've seen the interoperability lab where they do all the testing," says Martin. "Veritas consulting is for real."
-- Martin J. Garvey |
