Report Sorts SAN Management Mess

Today's multivendor SANs are getting more manageable, thanks to bulked-up software suites from a raft of suppliers. But users risk disappointment if they don't investigate up front exactly what hardware will be managed by their new wares, says Byte and Switch Insider, this publication's paid subscription research service.

According to this month's report, "Integrated Storage Management:Closer, but No Cigar," makers of SAN management and storage resource management (SRM) products have made big strides in supporting third-party technology and offering heterogeneous product support. Unfortunately, "heterogeneous" does not mean "universal."

Companies whose products are covered in the report include

Other companies covered in this report are Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), DataCore Software Corp., InterSAN Inc., Onaro Inc., QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC), Storability Inc., and Tek-Tools Inc.

All offer differing hardware support profiles.For instance, though 12 products surveyed manage switches from Brocade and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), at least one management system doesn't handle Fibre Channel switches from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). Five products don't support switches from Qlogic.

When it comes to storage arrays, variation is even greater: support of EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM systems is a given, but companies differ in the models they manage.

What's more, suites of software typically require specific drivers in the devices they support, and these drivers can vary widely within suites or between different suites. Prospective users must factor into the product cost the time it will take to ensure that storage elements have the exact drivers and patch levels required by the management suite they're hoping to buy.

There are solutions to all this in the works. Standards such as the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) from the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are still in their infancy, however, and aren't likely to take off for at least another year, the report says.

Meanwhile, vendors have had to forge numerous relationships -- often with competitors -- to support proprietary products. Groups of vendors such as EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and HP have set up partnerships and co-development efforts, and some even have formal API exchange agreements to ensure that their management software can work with one another's hardware.While this works to some extent, it doesn't solve the problem. Indeed, it seems to have resulted in a Byzantine set of compatibility matrices. Further, uneven hardware compatibility across suites highlights another difficulty: Products vary not just in the devices they support but in the level and quality of management provided.

For example, some systems provide a consistent view of devices and description of network events that reconcile product differences, but others do so to a lesser extent. For example, terminology may vary for the same metric on different devices.

Despite the difficulties, it looks like user demand, now pushing SAN management growth into double digits annually, will help continue the momentum. Still, in many cases, customers will have to rely on more than one product to cover all the hardware and perform all the functions desired, or else accept the shortcomings of the chosen suite. At the very least, customers will find they often need vendor-specific device management tools for very granular control of SAN elements, in addition to an overarching management suite.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

More information about the Byte and Switch Insider report, "Integrated Storage Management:Closer, but No Cigar," is available here0