SANavigator is by far the most complete of the two packages we looked at. The company is going through some changes -- Fibre Channelęswitch vendor McData Corp. acquired it in September 2001 for $29.75 million. This gives SANavigator access to McData's deep pockets and its gear, and gives McData a viable player in the heterogeneous storage-management-software arena. This latest version of SANavigator, 2.5, has a few interface enhancements and the ability to take a snapshot of the physical architecture of your SAN for disaster-recovery purposes.
SANavigator takes an interesting approach with its software. The company wants its product to be used in all phases of the life of a SAN network, including planning, discovery, configuration and monitoring. The planning module can let you add or subtract from your current discovered SAN. In addition, a planned SAN can be "activated" and compared with your current SAN to check for obvious errors (if you do find an error, however, you're on your own -- no advice is offered). This planning capability is one of the main differentiating features of SANavigator. At the time of this writing, SANavigator costs $4,995.
Installation of the software was dead simple: Just insert the CD, and you're cooking. After going through the familiar litany of "Where do you want to install this, and what is your serial number?" the software was installed. We fired it up, and SANavigator immediately checked the local subnet, discovering half of our test-bed SAN.
Two options were available in the out-of-band section: specific IP addresses to discover and whole subnets to discover. You can also do in-band discovery, which entails using Fibre Channel itself to do the discovery of the SAN network. One note: To do this, the Fibre Channel HBA on the management station needs to be compliant with the 1999 SNIA API standard for Fibre Channel HBAs. Discovery seemed to be the same either in or out of band.
The visualization feature in SANavigator is outstanding, and the physical view of the SAN is a great boon, especially for large storage networks.
As for Ethernet, the product supports both in-band and out-of-band Ethernet discovery. The out-of-band discovery was no problem; it worked like a charm after we added to SANavigator's discovery table the subnets in which our SAN equipment was located. The in-band discovery was a bit problematic, however. To use the in-band discovery feature of the software, you have to have an in-band HBA driver for the HBA where you have installed the SANavigator management station. Thus, we embarked on an odyssey for this HBA driver.
The old QLogic Corp. 2100 HBA we first had in the Compaq unit was too old to support this function, so we broke out the new QLogic SANblade 2300, downloaded the latest HBA drivers and patched the HBA BIOS to the latest publicly available revision. We still had no in-band option in SANavigator. We scratched our heads, then called SANavigator, which told us that we needed a special driver that is not on QLogic's Web site but is available from QLogic if we asked. OK.
So we called QLogic, which was not sure what we were talking about. Finally, we called SANavigator back, and the company sent us a copy of the QLogic driver, which, as it turns out, is not a driver at all but a SAN device-management SDK from QLogic. Got that so far? When QLogic got back to us again, we found out that the 2300 HBA is not yet certified with SANavigator. QLogic said it expects that the certification process will be finished in the first quarter of this year.
Another significant feature of SANavigator is its ability to monitor traffic. The lines between devices are color-coded, so you can easily visualize the percentage of utilization. Scales are divided in 20 percent increments, up to 100 percent, so you can quickly spot bottlenecks in your SAN structure and take steps to alleviate them.
You can get full Fibre Channel worldwide name and hard ALPAs by clicking on the visual representation of the device. Right-clicking on a device will also bring up the option to run either a preconfigured application or one you set up. For example, much to our amusement, when we right-clicked on the representation for the Vixel 8100 switch, SANavigator said it couldn't configure the switch but obligingly offered to run SAN InSite, which can, presumably, configure the device. SANavigator is aware of many of the applications used to configure SAN hardware and looks for them in their default paths on the machine on which you have installed SANavigator.
You can also set up your own defaults in the event that SANavigator is unaware of the configuration application for a selected piece of hardware, or if the appropriate configuration application is installed in a nondefault location on your machine.
One of the biggest problems we had with the SANavigator is the price, a steep $195 per port, with features such as performance management and the planning offerings costing extra.
SANavigator 2.5, $195 per port; performance management, $79 per port; SAN planning module, $4,995; price as tested on our SAN, $11,571. SANavigator (part of McData Corp.), (408) 232-1000; fax (408) 232-9869. www.sanavigator.com
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