Storage Pipeline: Review: Out of the Abyss: Page 2 of 8

The difficulties don't end with the header issue, though. Life-cycle
management confronts much the same set of problems that every other management
scheme faces, except point management. Specifically, hardware products have not
been designed for common management within a heterogeneous environment.
Management-software vendors are at the mercy of hardware vendors for access to
their APIs and other configuration and monitoring controls, and many hardware
vendors simply are not interested in supporting anything that would enable
competitive products to share space within the customer's shop.

The storage utility remains an airy vision without much substance--more
"marketecture" than architecture--and storage management in a heterogeneous
environment continues to be a work in progress. To gauge the progress that has
been made in delivering the various functions that make up the utility
storage-management stack (see "SRM Stack," at right), Storage Pipeline created
an RFI featuring a hypothetical company with some real-world storage
configurations. We sent the RFI in August to about 20 of the industry's leading
storage-management software vendors. Fictitious Minuteman Mortgage presented its
storage-management conundrum, and three vendors, Computer Associates
International, Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. (Softek) and Storability,
responded with in-depth solutions.

In the end, it was a tough call. In fact, all three solutions earned a B+
(see our Report Card). The solution from Storability scored solidly for
well-designed business views, intuitive operability, broad standards support and
well-integrated core components. But its solution overall wasn't the best fit
for Minuteman Mortgage.

Fujitsu Softek's solution also had some impressive strengths. It showed
strong policy support, excellent environment support and strong topology
discovery and visualization.

All three were viable, and all three vendors are qualified to do the job. But
Computer Associates' BrightStor proposal--with its emphasis on policy-driven
data movement, without a requirement, at least initially, to add unfamiliar
technology layers like virtualization--stood out. We agreed with Computer
Associates that improvements in capacity allocation and utilization efficiency
could be made quickly and permanently if Minuteman simply implemented the
disciplined management of its storage.

Our complete RFI and the respondents' proposals can be found online here.

To summarize, Minuteman Mortgage sought comprehensive management for its
storage infrastructure, which contained a broad mix of platforms and topologies.
With 30 TB of heterogeneous storage, primarily in direct-attached
configurations, and a Fibre Channel SAN fabric, obtained through an acquisition
of another company and which had reached its maximum node capacity, Minuteman's
management problems were multiplying.To make matters worse, it had maxed out the
node capacity on the SAN.