Veritas Software Corp. announced the next step in its automated storage area management strategy Tuesday, adding policy creation and management, provisioning and reporting to its SANPoint Control 3.5.
SANPoint Control is part of Veritas’ Adaptive Software Architecture, which allows IT managers to monitor their storage infrastructure from a single console, reducing the complexity of managing storage devices from multiple vendors.
SANPoint Control is software for managing not only physical storage-area networking tasks such as path and zone management, but for providing a platform by which an IT manager can create policies to govern storage, tie it to applications such as Microsoft Corp. Exchange or Oracle Corp. databases, provision it and report on it. The software lets a storage administrator discover storage devices, configure them, automate processes relating to them, monitor them and report on the results of specific processes.
The software runs on a server attached to the storage-area network. Previously, SANPoint Control only managed Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) devices, but it now manages both direct-attached and tape storage. Future releases will manage network-attached and iSCSI storage. Veritas now has also integrated the operations of its Cluster Server, NetBackup and the Foundation Suite into SANPoint Control.
SANPoint Control allows a manager to discover the path data take through a storage infrastructure; to map its physical and logical relationships with other storage and applications; to establish policies that depend on throughput, capacity or the number of errors; and to respond automatically when thresholds are exceeded. It lets storage administrators provision storage and assign it to servers, as well as allocate new storage or remove storage as required.
The reporting function consists of over 100 reports that show capacity and utilization, the results of predictive analysis and summaries of storage device allocation. In addition, users can build custom reports with the SANPoint Control Reporter.
Veritas SANpoint Control, according to Gartner Inc., competes with EMC Corp.’s AutoIS and BMC Software Inc.’s Application-Centric Storage Management.
The company says it will add software, called the Global Operations Manager, to give a business view to storage, in the next 12 to 15 months.
SANPoint Control 3.5 starts at US$20,000. It is available now.
