Cox Scopes Out Its SAN

Cox Communications Inc. (NYSE: COX), the fourth largest cable operator in the U.S., has beefed up its storage management capabilities as it strides into a new sector of the communications market (see Storability Upgrades, Gets Cox).

Earlier this month Cox announced an 18 percent jump in its fourth-quarter revenues, in large part due to record growth in telephone subscriptions. The company said it added approximately 67,190 Cox Digital Telephone subscribers, ending 2002 with 718,420 customers, or 58 percent more than the year before (see Cox Voice Gambit Pays Off ).

Right now, the company has just over 100 TBytes of storage capacity in EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix and Clariion systems, as well as some older Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) arrays, which it has discovered can be much better managed and utilized to cope with its newfound growth (see Dell Plugs Cox Into EMC).

That storage, most of which is direct attached, is connected to Dell, HP, and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) Solaris servers. And taking care of this fat storage environment, by the way, are just two SAN administrators.

"We badly needed reporting capabilities to create modified reports on the storage environment to manage it better on a day-to-day basis," says Edd Smith, storage architect at Cox. [Edd. note: Yepp, Edd has two d's in his name.]For example, he says assigning logical unit numbers (LUNs) is far too complicated a process for the company. "Often we want to assign some storage to a server that's in a cluster, but we can't easily see what storage is already attached to each server," Smith says. "It involves going onto the host and doing research, then going onto the array and doing more research, but it never matches up just perfect." He says it's a manual effort that involves creating reams of Excel spreadsheets. "Then these have to be massaged so they make sense for management... which takes forever."

The upshot? Cox is taking a slice of its IT budget and spending it on software that provides better SAN reporting capabilities. How much, exactly, Smith was not at liberty to say.

Cox spent at least 18 months checking out the market to see what was on offer, before finally settling with Storability Inc. The company evaluated EMC's StorageScope reporting software, BMC Software Inc.'s (NYSE: BMC) Patrol Storage Manager [ed. note: whew! just as well they didn't go for that one! See BMC Folds Storage Unit], and Veritas Software Corp.'s (Nasdaq: VRTS) SANpoint Control, as well as software from Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) and CreekPath Systems Inc.

"The strongest competition to Storability was CreekPath," Smith says. "But we didn't look at [CreekPath] until late in the game, so they didn't have much of a chance." He says all the others were too expensive. "It came down to how much functionality we could get for the lowest price, and Storability came out ahead."

But what about the risks associated with relying on a startup? Smith says the risk is far outweighed by better pricing and more cooperation. "Smaller companies have a vested interest in using our name and getting good PR. To BMC and EMC, we are just another number." He says smaller companies are also more flexible and willing to add new features when a customer needs them, rather than when the vendor's next software release is scheduled."The Storability software helps us give upper management what they want to know, such as how much storage there is, how much is being used, capacity planning, and trending, uptime, and availability," Smith says. Storability's Global Storage Manager management software is in the design phase at the moment, but Cox expects to kick off the production environment later this month.

Smith hopes Cox's remote cable sites will also benefit from the new software. He says the idea is to let them manage their own storage. "Right now I have no clue what it going on over there, no picture into their environment. Storability should lessen that gap."

Not even Storability was perfect at everything, however. "All the products fell short on the switch management and reporting side," Smith says. He ended up picking another product written specifically to handle the task of pinpointing bottlenecks in the network. As a McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) shop, with one or two Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) switches, he chose SANavigator, McData's multivendor SAN device management software (see McData Stirs Up Software and McData Ships SANavigator 3.5