The first thing we did was define goals. In the category of SAN physical device management, there are a couple of clear objectives. First is to observe and manage SAN devices via a GUI from a central management station. We mean the physical management of the devices on the SAN not from an OS level but from a Fibre Channel fabric level. Second is to provide a map of the storage network, a process called visualization. This kind of map is a graphical representation of the hardware and the interconnects between devices. It is literally a map of your SAN.

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With these criteria in mind, we invited makers of heterogeneous SAN management software to participate in a bake-off. We identified three eligible vendors; two of them, SANavigator, with its eponymous offering, and Vixel Corp., with SAN InSite, agreed to participate in our review. The third, Veritas Software, maker of SANPoint Control, declined to participate.

Manage This

One major problem we had in our test bed is that we had no clear way to manage each piece of equipment on the SAN. This is not the fault of either software package; rather, the lack of management standards for SAN environments is the culprit. Ethernet has always had SNMP, which most SAN devices can use, but the specification for SNMP does not cover what it needs to in regards to SAN and Fibre Channel devices -- for example, Fibre Channel worldwide names and hard ALPAs (arbitrated loop physical addresses) are not manageable.

Back in November 2000, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) put forth a specification for a common application-programming interface for Fibre Channel HBAs (host bus adapters). This was intended to boost compatibility and give a common interface for all HBAs. A noble goal, and one that may have been accomplished on the programming level. From an end-user management perspective, however, it has fallen short (see "Open Standards for SAN Management").

The lack of implemented standards was particularly telling when we tried out SAN InSite and SANavigator. While both packages do their best, there isn't much support for cross-platform standards right now. Neither of the applications could manage the HBAs in the test SAN we had set up in our Real-World Labs® in Green Bay, Wis., without special drivers from the hardware vendors. This means that software vendors end up having to write custom modules for each equipment brand, or sometimes brand and model.

To give those of you familiar with Ethernet a frame of reference, the state of management standards is about where Ethernet was around 1995-96. Of course, the lack of standards in the '90s did not stop us from buying Ethernet. Things were simpler back then, and management was often an afterthought. Now, however, management is a key consideration, and we wonder what role the lack of standards plays for the 25 percent of readers who responded to our poll saying that they have no plans to deploy a SAN (see e-poll results).

Vendors and organizations such as SNIA and the Fibre Channel Industry Association have been working diligently to improve management standards, but a long road is still ahead. On the brighter side, we are told that a 2.0 specification for the HBA API standard is in the works and that we could see it in the next year.

When we built our test SAN we deliberately used some older equipment, such as the Emulex 7000 HBA and the Vixel 8100 switch. We felt that any truly heterogeneous product would have to deal with some of this older equipment, and we wanted to see if the two products we brought in could handle them. As it turns out, device management and compatibility in the Fibre Channel arena is so fragile that only the latest hardware products have a decent chance of being managed directly by third-party software.

If you have a heterogeneous environment, it's either because you used a best-of-breed approach or because you had to use legacy equipment. In either case, it may be necessary to do some updating to get the full benefit of physical management applications. Certain older equipment will likely never be manageable by this kind of software.

Head to Head

While we understand that the packages encompass more functionality, we limited this review to software that provides pure physical management of our SAN devices. SAN InSite is a bit easier to implement in a client/server architecture for central management. SANavigator does an adequate job here, however, and has a longer list of supported devices than does SAN InSite. SANavigator manages those devices better, which helped it win our Editor's Choice award.