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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: w2j2 who wrote (1070)	2/15/1999 6:56:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

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