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Put to the Test: Saner SAN Management: Page 7 of 15

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, a network design and consulting firm in Hoboken N.J. Write to him at [email protected].

The storage industry has yet to deliver a standard for managing heterogeneous Fibre Channel SANs, but plenty of vendors have software so you don't have to resort to a kludge of telnet, Web browsers and Visio printouts. Computer Associates, McData and Softek sent us their SAN management software, and we put each through its paces.

These packages automate discovery, visualization, status information, performance monitoring and element management using proprietary interfaces and APIs. Our Editor's Choice, McData's SANavigator, is highly flexible and efficient. We also were impressed with Softek's support for a wide range of devices. You'll need to look over each product's list of compatible devices, particularly for new equipment. In all, these products deliver on their promises to improve on the SAN management experience.

We tested the SAN managers on our in-house storage-area network. Each vendor also gave us remote access to a management station on its lab SAN, so we could evaluate features our hardware didn't support.

The test SAN comprised a Compaq RA4100 disk array; Dell PowerVault 50F (OEM Brocade Silkworm) eight-port Fibre Channel switch; Brocade Silkworm 2800 16-port Fibre Channel switch; Dell PowerVault 35F Fibre Channel to SCSI bridge with DLT7000 tape drive; Gadzoox Bitstrip nine-port hub; two Fibre Channel JBOD enclosures with Seagate and IBM FC drives; a Compaq ProLiant 5500 Server (Windows 2000 Server, Compaq HBA) and an IBM Netfinity 3500 Server (Windows Server 2003, Qlogic 2100 HBA). It also had three whitebox servers: two P4s (with 2.8-GHz, 512 MB of RAM, Windows 2000 Server--one with an LSI Logic 909 HBA, the other with an Emulex 7000E HBA); and one AMD Athlon 900 (51 MB of RAM and a Qlogic 2200 HBA).