Embracing StorageEmbracing Storage

That's certainly the experience of some users. Managing Sun Microsystems storage technology along with clustered-storage-system vendor 3PARdata Inc.'s technology is just too labor intensive, says Myles Trachtenberg, chief technology officer at online grocer FreshDirect LLC. "I'd take a look at a single management console for both environments," he says.

Vendors claim they're finally addressing this pain point. On the horizon is management software that lets IT staffers use one console to control storage from a number of vendors. And a new standard in the storage industry should help that effort along.

IBM plans to beef up marketing and services support of its SAN Volume Controller product and is considering loading the SAN controller on a partition from its new DS8000 storage system, so customers can manage multiple vendors' systems from that single interface. And Symantec next year plans to ship its management console for backup and recovery, patch management, and other important infrastructure requirements.

EMC customers next year will be able to use Control Center 5.2, a storage-management-software suite, to provision storage capacity automatically and monitor and report on the health, utilization, and performance of multivendor storage components from a single user interface. To do that, the company is supporting the Storage Management Initiative Specification, which lets systems from different vendors communicate. The specification came out of the Storage Networking Industry Association, whose members include EMC, IBM, and Veritas.

Evaluator Group's Martin is optimistic about better management capabilities. "We were skeptical about how the system vendors would respond to SMI-S, and we're pleasantly surprised," he says. Storage software vendors such as Computer Associates and Veritas should support the Storage Management Initiative Specification next year, Martin says. "We'll really be excited when software vendors start providing the management interface in the products they ship."

Veritas has always counted on a heterogeneous computing world and customers who need to support multiple operating systems and storage environments. As a software developer, Veritas says it has an advantage over hardware vendors like IBM. "They can't just wake up one morning and say they're heterogeneous," says Jeremy Burton, executive VP of data management at Veritas.

In the same way, customers can't just wake up and have all their storage-management needs met. But developments next year may get them a little closer to that dream.

Illustration by Dan Page

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