"What's different about this is we don't replace a bunch of complex, hard-to-use tools with another hard-to-use tool," says Eric Pitcher, brand manager for CA's SAN management products.
But vendors that have already been offering SAN performance monitoring tools aren't standing still. McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), for one, is adding intelligent features to its SANavigator software that the company says will help users pinpoint operational issues.
"We have customers that have thousands of ports in a Fibre Channel SAN, and they are asking for advanced diagnostics so that when there is a problem we can help resolve it," says Robert Jordan, director of software marketing at McData.
For example, he says, SAN monitoring tools available today can tell a user that a specific port is receiving an unusually high number of errors. But it can't very easily explain why that's happening. "To find that out, you have to trace it down to the LUN [logical unit number] and HBA [host bus adapter]," Jordan says. "That's difficult to do today."
BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) also offer SAN performance monitoring as part of their network management software. HP's OpenView Storage Optimizer software keeps historical data of the performance of storage components, and supports storage arrays from HP, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), as well as from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData.
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