Is Storage Growing a Brain?

6:00 PM -- For Raul Robledo, storage specialist with the Affinion Group, storage capacity planning used to involve freeware and a spreadsheet. His group used the freeware to gather performance statistics from switches and hosts. The spreadsheet -- or other desktop software, depending on who was doing it -- was then used to plot the freeware stats against actual applications deploying those hosts and switches.

The end result was apparently satisfactory, but it usually required someone on staff to become an expert in this home-made planning technique. And if that person left or was out, the job went undone.

Not the most modern method for a company boasting expertise in the 21st-century activity of relationship marketing.

Enter Onaro, whose latest application, SANscreen Application Insight, tracks the worldwide names associated with Fibre Channel connections along with application performance data in order to measure how well storage is supporting specific departments and tasks. (See Onaro Intros New Application.)

It's not cheap: To run this new app at $70 per port, you'll need SANscreen Foundation at $185 per port. It may or may not be worth it for the ability to validate service levels, match the right storage to the right apps, and depict which applications use the most storage resources.Affinion's Robledo thinks it's worth it. Now he doesn't need one person to spend all day tailoring capacity, or making a change if one is indicated by service levels.

I couldn't help thinking about Onaro when talking to 3Leaf last week. (See 3Leaf Sprouts Up.) That company too is using Fibre Channel's worldwide name convention to make better use of storage resources. The comparison doesn't hold up, because Onaro is in a totally different market space (SRM, as opposed to storage virtualization). But the principle of applying intelligence to storage paths is a theme for both products.

We'll be anxious to see if other storage users can wrap their brains around this one.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch