Poll: Who's The Best At Storage Management Software?
Uncategorized — By Chris Evans on May 14, 2009 at 7:04 PMOK, I haven’t had a poll on the site for a while, so just for fun here’s one; who writes the best storage management software for their products? Answers on a postcard, or alternatively, just click on one of the buttons below. Answers in a week or so.
Tags: poll, storage management
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Tweet This
Digg This
Save to delicious
Stumble it
16 Comments
I don’t think anyone has the best toolset. I have spent a great deal of time with quite a few (Sun, EMC, IBM, Netapp, SGI). I remember commenting on (StorageBod) just how horrible ECC was, it just did not scale well. I cannot remember the countless times I had to reconfigure my DMX into ECC. In a rush to provision I was forced to use SymCLI (Blah!). Onaro when I used it was a great tool, not just for Netapp. It helped us identify unmapped luns on the Symmetrix — which without customized scripts was near impossible. To EMCs credit Navisphere is a great toolset. I wish the same functionality was tied tightly into ECC a bit better.
The EMC pundits always do well to start a bicker war. Each tool has its strengths and weakness — how about vendors working together enhancing the tools for us multi-vendor shops?
Storage Management Software should never be just tied to an individual vendors products, in a large environment it is rare to find a 100% exlusive vendor. There’s always some oddball device purchased as it was cheap or came with a free pen. The question shouldn’t be “who writes the best storage management software for their products?” It should be “who writes the best storage management software?”
Thinking about that, you need something that is quick and easy to deploy, vendor neutral, that gives a holistic view of the storage service from application to LUN and most importantly has a low cost.
The nearest I’ve seen is netapp’s sanscreen. Low cost is pretty subjective but I think the price can be justified by the operational benefits the tool brings. I’d hate to go back to using spreadsheets to manage my infrastructure.
To date, my recommendation would have to go to one of two options that aren’t on the list :
SUN with the new Unified Storage Bays or
Compellent
Mostly because the underlying storage management has been simplified, the resulting management tools have become easier to use…
Alphageek – not familiar with the Compellent interface, but I agree with you on Sun and their USS storage arrays (Amber Road). The web GUI certainly is good.
Chris
Jimbob – you’ll see that I didn’t phrase it to specifically reference vendor own management “When thinking about Storage Management Software – who is best?”. I agree, it would be a travesty if a vendor couldn’t write decent software for even their own products.
SANScreen’s looking a bit tired now and more like a loose collection of almost related products. The new breed of storage management tools need to deliver better integration between components, deep dive on every product they support and an extensive reach into both the host and application – now that would be worth paying for.
Chris
i think Tarmin SRM is promising one for Hetrogenous storage environment. All features are available including provisioning, automated data transfer migrations from Tier 1 to Tier3 and T2 to T3 .
We are in the process of scrapping all our installs of EMC ECC, and just using the native tools for storage provisioning, eg Navisphere, EMC Symm Console, CISCO and Brocade native SAN tools etc… they are soooo much faster and more efficient than trying to use some one big consolidated overbearing tool like ECC to do it all for all platforms.
So, since we will not be using ECC for provising at all, its about 3/4’s of its worth, the rest is simply doing the function of reporting which ECC is quite expensive just for that.
The replacement we are going with is TekTools Profiler. Its DIRT CHEAP compared to ECC and works great, with a company who’s developers will actually respond to change requests and input from customers.
In reflection, the whole idea of one big tool was kind of silly to begin with. All you really need is a good data collector and reporting tool.
Han
I think at the moment you are correct. The vendor supplied “element manager” tools plus a reporter is the way to go. We’re still a long way from a “one SRM tool to rule them all” scenario, if ever at all.
Chris
Sudhindra, not a tool I’m familiar with.
Chris
Quite agree we need good a data collector and reporter. What is the use of if the tool does not do intelligent way like provisioning and transfer data over the period based on policy? If i spent lot of money on tool how can i justy my seniors without doing much intelligenty tasks by tool?
Because we tend to expect how much we can save from Copex, Opex, ROI , TCO etc. with the help of the tool.
While the V-Max is better that the old. Compellent is still way ahead in the ease of managment. Hardware needs work though.
While the V-Max is better that than old DMX. Compellent is still way ahead in the ease of managment. Hardware needs work though.
Bud
I’m not familiar with the Compellent hardware. Hope to look at it in the future.
Chris
In reply to Han Solo,
we are going down the same path as you – using the vendor supplied tool for managing allocation and configuration on each array and switch and putting in Tek Tools Profiler for reporting capabilities. We looked at Veritas Command Central Storage, but for the cost vs features, Profiler is hard to beat, and you’re right about the company – responsive and easy to deal with.
Karim,
Seems to be the current way to go….
Chris