November 6, 2000

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Storage Nets: What Works?

Companies are learning that the promise of storage area networks is far from the reality

By Martin J. Garvey

More on storage area networks:

TechWeb: Tivoli, CA Upgrade Storage Management (10/31/00) Computer Reseller News: PRISA PAID -- Net storage market grows (10/30/00) Internet Week: Cybersettle Settles On SANs (10/16/00)

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BN-Amro Information Technology Services Co., the IT unit of the international financial-services firm, is a full year behind in moving 8 terabytes of data to a storage area network. The problem: The company can't make some of its switches work with some of its servers.

"The vendors have these interoperability labs, but it doesn't feel like integration to us," says Dennis Wang, an open-systems manager at ABN-Amro. The company is attempting to link together Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems servers, EMC Symmetrix storage, Brocade Communications Systems switches, and Fibre Channel hubs from Storage Technology. "I don't know what the problem is, but I shouldn't have to care," he says.

Wang isn't alone in his frustration. Businesses are learning the hard way that the promise of SANs--in which a specialized high-speed network connects a diverse collection of storage devices and servers so that every server and application can access all the data--is a far cry from the reality.

SANs are supposed to let IT managers use everything from tape libraries to low-cost storage appliances and drive down prices through increased competition in the process. But they can be costly, difficult to manage, and hard to integrate. Storage vendors, which would rather sell a complete network than a few pieces, don't seem serious about making multivendor SANs easy to build or operate.

Now, three major systems-management vendors say they can solve the problems. BMC Software, Computer Associates, and IBM's Tivoli Systems last week unveiled software designed to make SANs more capable, interoperable, and easier to manage.

Meta Group estimates that companies spend 30% to 40% of their IT budget on storage, and SANs are one of the fastest-growing segments of the storage market. Sales of systems-management products for SANs are expected to increase from $500 million this year to $3.3 billion in 2004, according to Strategic Research Corp. That growth will come because IT managers are desperate for help.

"I don't want to be in the interoperability business," says Dirk Van Dall, VP of digital video at Showtime Networks Inc. in New York. The cable-TV company has a SAN built on storage from Data Direct (formerly MegaDrive), switches from Vixel, host-bus adapters from ATTO Technology, and a management app called Sanergy from Tivoli.

Van Dall says Showtime needs a Fibre Channel SAN in order to move video clips in and out of storage quickly. But he's having trouble getting some of the pieces to work together, and he says the vendors haven't been much help. "There's finger pointing," he says.

SAN problems--which range from incompatible vendor implementations of the high-speed Fibre Channel standard to slow development of host-bus adapters by server vendors--can have serious consequences. Businesses that use Windows NT and Unix face additional challenges. "Those systems dictate that there be a storage system for each platform rather than a common environment," says Carl Greiner, a Meta Group analyst.

Greiner adds that server vendors and some storage vendors have been slow to adopt host-bus adapters, which are used to move data from servers and storage devices on and off the Fibre Channel network. Servers that don't have the Fibre Channel-compliant adapters can't connect to a SAN.

Systems-management vendors, which specialize in monitoring and controlling multivendor environments, may be able to help. Tivoli last week unveiled a SAN management tool that's compliant with a standard developed by the American National Standards Institute called Fibre Channel Methodologies for Interconnects. The Tivoli Storage Network Manager, available now, lets customers set policies to monitor and steer data movement based on thresholds and parameters established by storage administrators. The software also lets IT managers handle peak loads by increasing storage capacity for specific applications on the fly. Prices for Tivoli Storage Network Manager start at $3,400 for a 32-bit server with up to four Intel processors.

Tivoli plans to take things a step further this week when it lays out a blueprint for Tivoli Storage Tank, a layer of SAN software that sits on Windows and Unix servers and creates a virtual pool of data from all servers and storage devices. Tivoli plans to make a developers' kit available in January, but actual products won't be available until the second half of next year.

BMC last week unveiled its Application-Centric Storage Management tool, which works with the company's Patrol system-management framework. The product can be used to direct storage policies and procedures from an application such as order entry, and can discover, capture, and report physical attributes and event information for storage systems and components, including bridges, hubs, and routers. The software provides a single system view of multiple storage systems, including those from Compaq, EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM, and Sun. It will be available in March; prices will range from $15,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also last week, CA unveiled the Storage Area Network Integrated Technology Initiative Framework to help its customers discover and manage all the heterogeneous systems and components on a SAN. The free framework is available now and lets administrators use a single interface to conduct device discovery, topology mapping, and real-time monitoring of SAN devices.

IT managers hope the products work as promised. Paul Montrose, business unit leader at Acxiom Corp., a billion-dollar database-management and direct-marketing company in Little Rock, Ark., plans to deploy BMC's tool to manage about 100 terabytes of data stored on systems from Compaq and EMC. Acxiom also has Fibre Channel switches from Brocade and McData Corp.

Montrose expects BMC's software to give him a complete view of the company's diverse storage systems and servers and help identify potential problems early. "We should be able to see things like disk contention that can take down the system," he says. "If the users are calling us, it's already too late."

Businesses that use, or want to use, SANs may also get help from the standards process. ANSI's T11 committee created the Fibre Channel Methodologies for Interconnects standard so there would be a common way to discover and manage storage resources on a Fibre Channel-based SAN. Few products incorporate the FC-MI standard, but it's been endorsed by Compaq, EMC, HP, Sun, and others. FC-MI-compliant products similar to Tivoli's are expected in the next year.

Michael Peterson, an analyst at Strategic Research, says progress is being made on the standards front. He cites the storage-management interface created by EMC's Fibre Alliance consortium and maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force, and notes that all the major switch vendors are working to agree on how data will move through their switches.

IT managers say bigger and better Fibre Channel switches would also help. Fidelity Investments Systems Inc. in Irving, Texas, which is responsible for archiving and providing access to customer data for other parts of the financial-services firm, is looking for switches with more ports. Fidelity uses 16-port Fibre Channel switches from Brocade and 32-port switches from McData; it has about 1,000 servers attached to the switches, handling 90 terabytes of data. "Our biggest issue is the connectivity" to EMC Symmetrix storage systems, says Michael Womack, a systems analyst consultant of distributed systems. "We'd like to see some 256-port switches."

Womack may get his wish. Brocade, Q-Logic, McData, and InRange will all deliver 64-, 128-, and 256-port switches, Meta's Greiner says. The larger switches will be a boon, he says, because "one big switch gives me full access to the storage."

SANs continue to attract new customers. Dean Holland, senior AIX systems administrator for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee in Chattanooga, wants to build a SAN using BMC's tool. The insurer uses IBM RS/6000 servers, a Tivoli systems-management server, and hard-disk storage, and plans to purchase Brocade switches. SAN or no SAN, Holland is concerned about disk contention. Large disks, those with up to 72 Gbytes of data, "are likely to have multiple apps sharing the same space, and that can lead to hot spots that will have a serious impact on application response times," he says.

Holland says he hopes a SAN will deliver several benefits: "We'll no longer have to manually replace disks and restore data. We'll no longer have to physically recable servers when we move data. And under a SAN, it will be easier to monitor and manage the entire storage environment."

At least that's the way it's supposed to work.

---with additional reporting by George V. Hulme

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