Vendors Opt For All-In-One Strategy

Software has become the focal point for managing SANs, as businesses look for ways to get the most from their growing multivendor storage networks. In fact, a recovery in storage hardware spending led to a boom in storage software sales, according to research firm IDC. Worldwide storage software revenue hit $6.3 billion in 2003, up 8 percent from $5.8 billion in 2002, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, released last week. Fourth-quarter sales in 2003 reached $1.8 billion, up nearly 18 percent from $1.5 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Solution providers say that integrating storage management software tools into a single-user console makes them easier to use and more amenable to automation.

>> Some vendors have been buying up other software vendors and integrating their SAN management functions into a single GUI.

Most of the tools in use today are reporting tools and still rely on administrators to do the actual management, said Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at Open Systems Solutions, Yardley, Pa.

Carson hopes to soon see software tools for managing SANs as complete as those now offered by switch vendors for managing IP networks. However, he knows that it will take some time. "We don't see many people with grandiose visions of centralized management like EMC had with its WideSky initiative,and they pulled back from that," he said.

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Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Sun Microsystems partner in Denver, said the time for an integrated approach to SAN management has come, as vendors such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM rally around the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and Common Information Model (CIM) standards.

By applying standards to SAN management, Teter said, all the various components of a SAN, regardless of vendor, can be managed actively by what he called "a single pane of glass." This approach allows SAN management tools to manage components without needing to rewrite tools for each vendor, he said.

Both Teter and Carson cited Burlington, Mass.-based AppIQ as one example of a software vendor offering SAN management tools close to their ideals.

The StorageAuthority Suite from AppIQ features integrated SAN management, storage resource management and storage provisioning capabilities for heterogeneous SANs using the SMI-S and CIM standards. Sun, Hitachi and SGI have all signed OEM or reseller agreements with AppIQ.

Another vendor that has assembled an integrated approach to SAN management using in-house tools rather than working with multiple outside vendors is IBM, said Hunt Russell, sales manager at Evolving Solutions, a Hamel, Minn.-based IBM solution provider. IBM has brought its multiple storage software applications under its Tivoli umbrella. "Customers don't want to deal with one product for this and one for that," Russell said. "It becomes a management hassle."

Some vendors have been working on integrated SAN management offerings by buying other software vendors and integrating their functions into a single GUI.

The move to integrate SAN management is expanding, as vendors either acquire or sign technology relationships with enterprise content management developers to unify the two under the concept of information life-cycle management, or ILM, say solution providers.

Under ILM, the management of data from the time it is developed until it is erased becomes automated, allowing users to set policies related to the retention and deletion of data based on new government requirements, such as those dictated by Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

For instance, EMC last year acquired Documentum for its enterprise content management software, and Hewlett-Packard acquired Persist Technologies, a provider of software for storage and access of information for regulatory purposes.

ILM has become a fundamental aspect of SAN management as customers start to implement business policies based on data, Teter said. "Before, the back-end infrastructure was not utilized as much as it could have been. Everything was application-specific, and data was put into silos," he said. "But as things get networked, ILM is generating a whole new community around SAN management."