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SAN Management

Before each issue of Network Computing hits the presses we conduct an e-poll of our readers to find out where they're at on our subject du jour. Usually, the results are pretty much in line with what we expect--in fact, we often pat ourselves on the back because we have such a firm finger on the pulse of the enterprise. So you can imagine our discomfort when we get taken off guard, as happened in the case of our recent poll on SAN management. The numbers told us a surprising tale: Fully 25 percent of you have no plans to deploy a SAN, 27 percent have deployed one, and the rest of you are between six (16 percent) and more than 24 (9 percent) months from your expected SAN deployment date. Of those who have deployed a SAN, nearly half--47 percent--use hardware from more than one vendor.

We drew a few conclusions from this. First, SANs are by no means as ubiquitous as vendors would like us to believe. Why? High initial cost, no clear return on investment and a lack of expertise are the reasons most cited. We'd like to add our personal favorite, "crappy standards support," to that list. Second, you like living dangerously. How else to explain all the heterogeneous SANs out there in the face of, well, crappy standards support? We hope our review of software products to manage mixed SANs offers a bit of a safety net.

In general, SAN-management software has some good things to offer your enterprise, among them the ability to map your SAN environment visually, problem reporting and centralized configuration. If you expect to expand your SAN environment, or if you already possess a large SAN, this software will improve efficiency and aid in problem determination. But the beauty of it is, these are only the tip of the benefits iceberg.

A less immediate yet still tasty advantage is that much more functionality is going to be built into SANavigator (our Editor's Choice award winner), SAN InSite and other software in the coming years. Customers are demanding more and better features every day, and companies that get in early have the opportunity to grow with the software, as opposed to performing a forklift upgrade across the entire enterprise down the road. While these products will not do everything, they are a good start for any company that needs to get a grip on its SAN environment.