Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) today released its first SAN management tool, intended to simplify the care and feeding of Fibre Channel networks (see CA Launches SAN Manager).
It remains to be seen how well this product will fare, but CA's BrightStor SAN Manager could cause some heartburn for competitors, especially for some smaller players. While the software is explicitly designed to integrate tightly with CA's Unicenter enterprise management framework, CA is also selling it as an affordable standalone product -- starting at around $1,000 per server.
David Hill, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc., says CA's SAN Manager is very good at discovering and mapping devices in a multivendor SAN. "It's important that they're not just a monitoring tool, they're a doing tool," he says. "Everybody is talking about various things for the future -- self-healing systems, policy-based management -- and CA is clearly going in the same direction."
CA says its target market for SAN Manager is the enterprise operations center. The tool is supposed to allow the IT staffers who are already doing the day-to-day management of the rest of the enterprise's systems to also handle the storage area network.
"We've simplified SAN management so that your senior-level experts don't have to be the people who troubleshoot and manage it," says Eric Pitcher, brand manager for BrightStor SAN management products. "The SAN is no longer the red-headed stepchild sitting in the corner." [Ed. note: Just as long as the SAN doesn't turn into a cloned Raelian baby, I think we're all OK.]
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