SAN Monitoring Tools Grow Up

Fibre Channel performance monitoring tools have often been expensive, stubbornly hard-to-use products that didn't play well with other management systems -- especially when stacked up next to what's available in the Ethernet world.

That's now changing. As SANs become increasingly heterogeneous and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) gears up for its first foray into the market, traditional network management vendors -- including Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) and NetScout Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: NTCT) -- are introducing products for monitoring and troubleshooting SANs, while traditional SAN players are adding new features to keep pace.

"There's more interest in SAN management in general, because as organizations acquire more storage and adopt storage area networks, they need comprehensive tools to manage it," says Dave Hill, an analyst with Aberdeen Group Inc.

CA this week introduced its first SAN management system, BrightStor SAN Manager. The company says one of the key design goals with the product was to allow regular IT staffers -- who are not necessarily hard-core SAN experts -- to manage the storage network on a day-to-day basis (see CA Spans Into SANs).

SAN Manager, which integrates into CA's other products such as Unicenter, provides real-time status information about the health of a SAN fabric; graphically displays device configuration and performance status; and shows how various routes through the fabric are being utilized."What's different about this is we don't replace a bunch of complex, hard-to-use tools with another hard-to-use tool," says Eric Pitcher, brand manager for CA's SAN management products.

But vendors that have already been offering SAN performance monitoring tools aren't standing still. McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), for one, is adding intelligent features to its SANavigator software that the company says will help users pinpoint operational issues.

"We have customers that have thousands of ports in a Fibre Channel SAN, and they are asking for advanced diagnostics so that when there is a problem we can help resolve it," says Robert Jordan, director of software marketing at McData.

For example, he says, SAN monitoring tools available today can tell a user that a specific port is receiving an unusually high number of errors. But it can't very easily explain why that's happening. "To find that out, you have to trace it down to the LUN [logical unit number] and HBA [host bus adapter]," Jordan says. "That's difficult to do today."

BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) also offer SAN performance monitoring as part of their network management software. HP's OpenView Storage Optimizer software keeps historical data of the performance of storage components, and supports storage arrays from HP, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), as well as from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData.Then there's Cisco itself, which is bringing Ethernet-like performance monitoring tools, such as ping and traceroute, to Fibre Channel with its MDS 9500-series family of FC switches. The switches also include an embedded FC protocol analyzer that monitors the fabric in real time. Cisco has also developed what it calls Virtual SAN (VSAN) technology, which is able to logically segregate multiple SANs running over the same physical infrastructure, similar to VPNs or Virtual LANs in the Ethernet world (see Cisco Knocks 'Nerd Knobs' and Cisco's VSANs: Hype or Innovation?).

"When we talk to IT managers about things that have been in existence in the Ethernet world like ping and traceroute, their eyes really light up and say, 'That will really help me,' " says Jackie Ross, VP of marketing at Andiamo Systems Inc., the Cisco spin-in that is developing the MDS switches. Note, however, that many of these sexy management features will work in a Cisco-only SAN (see Cisco Buys Andiamo).

While companies like CA and Cisco see data networking and SAN operations functions converging, some say these constituencies are culturally far apart. "Those groups don't generally want to share stuff," says Dave Signori, director of advanced storage networking services at Inrange Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: INRG). "The attitude is, 'Hey, don't touch the SAN.' " [Ed. note: Or else!]

NetScout, meanwhile, has introduced a Fibre Channel version of its well-established Ethernet performance monitoring system. The NetScout FC product is based on hardware "probes" that attach to a SAN to provide an array of protocol analysis (see NetScout Probes Into SANs).

Eileen Haggerty, senior product marketing manager at NetScout, says the Fibre Channel monitoring system is especially well suited for environments with switches from multiple vendors."What we're doing is helping to analyze what precisely is going on in the packet when there are interoperability issues," she says. "In the old Ethernet days, they didn't have ways to troubleshoot what was going wrong until they got the protocol analyzers."

Predating NetScout's entry into the SAN monitoring market are two other providers of hardware probes, Finisar Corp.