Veritas Software Corp. is expected to release an enhanced version of its storage-area networking management software this week that lets storage administrators manage, monitor and control additional multivendor SAN gear.
The company will announce at Storage Management 2003 in Chicago that SANPoint Control 3.5.1 will now support a variety of new storage equipment. It will now be able to monitor and manage IBM Corp.’s high-end Enterprise Storage System (codenamed Shark), host computers running IBM’s AIX operating system, EMC’s midrange Clariion FC4700 arrays and IBM 2667 and 2669 host bus adapters Certification is also underway to qualify EMC’s CX Series midrange arrays.
SANPoint Control is Veritas’ flagship product for managing multivendor SANs, as well as direct server-attached SCSI and Fibre Channel storage. It is already capable of managing from a single console Solaris, Windows and HP-UX host computers and the HP StorageWorks, EMC Symmetrix, Hitachi Data Systems Freedom, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. arrays attached to them. SANPoint Control monitors capacity, automatically allocates resources as required, and monitors and reports on storage utilization and other characteristics of the SAN.
Steve Rubinow, CTO for electronic stock market Archipelago in Chicago has used SANPoint Control since last year to manage his quickly growing storage.
“We had acquired different brands of storage over the years for different purposes or applications and finally realized that approach was really wasteful,” Rubinow says. “We had a study done that indicated that only 25 per cent of our total storage was being utilized and yet, we were constantly buying disks. We chose Veritas tools to manage our SAN and get utilization under control. The last time I looked our utilization of disk was over 80 per cent.”
Rubinow has about 1,100 Windows and Solaris servers attached to a 10TB SAN consisting of EMC Symmetrix, Hitachi Data Systems and HP StorageWorks.
SANPoint Control competes with EMC’s Enterprise ControlCenter Open Edition, Hitachi’s HiCommand and IBM Tivoli’s Storage Area Network Manager software.
SANPoint Control customers with maintenance agreements will get the new version at no charge. The product starts at US$20,000 for the Windows-based SANPoint Control Server. Additional modules are priced by the number of Fibre Channel switch ports under management and the number of host computers. SANPoint Control 3.5.1 is available immediately.
