The Gold Standard
- Article 2 of 2
- Information Unbound, October 2006
The interoperability standards necessary to manage heterogeneous storage environments are starting to crystallise.
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Storage area networks are attractive to many enterprises. But there was one overriding problem initially that stopped many from adopting SANs: they didn’t work unless highly skilled, highly expensive SAN consultants and managers made judicious choices in their suppliers, hardware and software. The biggest obstacle was getting different vendors’ equipment to work together, something that was frequently impossible.
The last few years have changed this situation considerably. Through groups such as the Fibre Channel Industry Association and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), vendors have been able to make connecting SAN hardware together far easier.
This has brought about considerable acquisition-cost benefits.
“The price advantages of being able to acquire kit from multiple vendors have been very enticing,” says Andrew Manners, head of UK storage for HP. “Once people have bought SANs and got them working, they’ve loved them so much they’ve bought four or five. But they haven’t stuck with one vendor because there’s such a cheap entry point and vendors have been doing deals that make it even cheaper.”
In addition, says Jon Pavitt, S&T EMEA storage services director at Unisys, organisations have tended to invest in SANs for individual projects; each project has simply bought a new SAN rather than brave internal politics and the organisational requirements necessary to increase the storage of an existing SAN.
But managing those different pieces of hardware, particularly from a single console, has proven a far greater challenge. In the majority of cases, vendors’ own storage management tools were capable only of managing and monitoring their own equipment using proprietary APIs. Third-party software vendors such as Veritas, now part of Symantec, were able to provide their own storage management tools only by tapping into these numerous APIs.
After several false starts and a long process that started as long ago as 1999, the storage industry has finally been able to agree on a set of management and control standards, SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), that make interoperability relatively feasible for all vendors.
“SMI-S is the poster child of what SNIA has achieved,” says Matthias Werner of IBM-Switzerland who is a member of the board of SNIA. “It’s where the most benefit is: switches, disks, under a single point of control.”
SMI-S 1.0.2, the latest version of the standards, enables both discovery and some degree of management of storage arrays, switches and hosts without the installation of any software agents. Any hardware that obeys the standard – the majority of new products now shipping – should in theory be manageable by software that understands the standards, using the exact same interface; it can also be monitored, providing detailed information such as temperature, power supplies, fan activity and capacity.
Guy Bunker, chief scientist at Symantec, says this has many benefits for end-users. “Standards offer the customers choice, which is something the hardware vendors are not particularly enthusiastic about. Without standards – and this is something Veritas suffered from – every management product has to understand every product it needs to manage. That discourages innovation from small companies.” Choice means cost-savings; it also allows software vendors to spend less time coping with specific hardware, rather than simply writing to a single standard.
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