For now, Nielsen is using AppIQ's software primarily in a "tactical" mode for reporting, device discovery, and to manage the SAN topology, Stevenson says. For certain tasks like provisioning, the company uses EMC ControlCenter as well as other vendors' tools, including Hitachi HiCommand.
"There's only so much of the storage frame manipulation you can do through AppIQ right now," Stevenson says. "And you have to keep the native tools for setup -- things you do once, then never do it again." Nielsen, which started evaluating AppIQ's software about eight months ago, has bought a 250-device license.
Stevenson says he expects to realize the full value of the software once AppIQ can associate application-level events with other elements in the SAN. Currently, the software's "resource dependency trees" provide a visual display of how everything connected to the SAN is configured. A coming version of AppIQ's software is supposed to be able to map Sybase Inc. event data directly into the resource dependency trees, which will help Stevenson and his team more quickly identify and fix performance and capacity issues with its database applications.
At that point, Nielsen is planning to broaden its use of AppIQ to give other administrators role-based access to only the portion of the SAN fabric that is relevant to them. That way, Stevenson says, database administrators in each individual business unit can resolve a particular problem independently. "The AppIQ product supports collaboration between the groups," he says.
Another plus in AppIQ's favor, according to Stevenson, is that its software is based on the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s Storage Management Specific Standard (SMI-S), which defines a core set of features. "The SMI-S standard is really where we're going now," he says. "It gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in and easing training for our storage architects."
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