Although it's more expensive than SANavigator for a small-scale setup, SANView's price scales better, and turns out to be less than half that of SANavigator's large-scale setup price. This package is a good option for SANs with switches from a variety of vendors because it supports a broader range of devices with its zone-management feature than the other products we reviewed.
Softek SANView, $12,595 (as configured), Softek, (408) 746-4990. www.softek.com
CA's Unicenter TNG typifies the manager-of-the-universe class of enterprise-management systems. There are modules and plug-ins for Unicenter to manage everything from mainframes to PDAs. BrightStor SAN Manager is based on the Unicenter infrastructure, and includes such Unicenter features and components as the 3-D user interface and report writer.
Like the other products we tested, BrightStor SAN Manager uses a client-server architecture. Agents, which CA calls proxies, collect data from HBA-equipped hosts; the BrightStor server polls managed devices and stores the data in a SQL Server repository. Clients display the data and manage devices. Unfortunately, unlike many other vendors that use SQL Server for administrative databases, CA has chosen not to include the MSDE-limited version of SQL Server on the BrightStor SAN Manager CD or in the installation program. Perhaps that's because the installation program disk holds more than 600 MB of files and requires at least 1 GB of free disk space to install. In any event, you'll need to have SQL Server up and running before installing SAN Manager.
CA assumes most organizations that would install a SAN management tool are running SQL Server and so could host an additional database. This might be true, but those servers are probably installed with the case-insensitive sort order, and BrightStor SAN Manager requires a server with the case-sensitive sort order. Furthermore, database admins aren't always jubilant over the prospect of adding administrative databases to production database servers. This reluctance could lead to hidden costs for the SQL Server system and license, or even more expensive meetings between the two groups to settle where the SAN Manager database should live.
When you start SAN Manager, following a straightforward (if big) installation, you're presented with the wide variety of Unicenter views into your data, including 2-D and 3-D maps and a SNMP MIB walker. Although this detail will attract existing CA users by presenting a common look and feel, we found the user interface overly complex, busy and confusing. We expected, for example, to find zoom on the View menu, but instead we had to hold the control and right-mouse buttons down while moving the mouse up and down to zoom in and out of the map view.
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