Vendors Promise Network, Storage Management Links

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May 1, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Users last week had mixed views of growing vendor efforts to create products that can merge network and storage management functions.

"It's a logical evolution," said Bill Mahoney, a network architect for the U.S. Air Force at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass., during the EMC World user conference in Boston.

On the other hand, "I don't see the natural fit to bring that all under one umbrella," said John Hegner, vice president of technology services at Liberty Medical Supply Inc., a user of EMC Corp. storage products in Port Saint Lucie, Fla.

"We have separate tools to manage our network and to manage our storage. I think the skill set and the tools to manage each product are different, and I don't see the big value of bringing them together," Hegner said.

Liberty Medical uses EMC's Navisphere storage management software and EPICenter network management products from Extreme Networks Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.

Meanwhile, several big storage vendors have disclosed plans to offer integrated storage and network management tools over the next year or two.

For example, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC announced plans at its user conference to integrate over the next 18 months its ControlCenter storage management functionality with the Smarts network management product family, which EMC acquired in 2004.

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to incorporate over the next six to 12 months storage management technology gained with last October's acquisition of AppIQ Inc. into its OpenView network management products, said Ash Ashutosh, chief technical officer of storage management software at the firm's StorageWorks division.

HP's storage management software already works with network management software from competitors such as BMC Software Inc. and IBM.

IBM and network management tool makers BMC, CA Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and HP Software Inc. agreed to jointly develop an industry standard for configuration management databases to ease the integration of storage and network management systems, said Kristof Kloeckner, vice president of development for IBM's Tivoli unit.

And Sun Microsystems Inc. this week will unveil several products that will bring it closer to offering combined storage and network management capabilities, said James Whitemore, vice president and chief marketing officer for Sun's data management group.

Jed Dobson, systems architect at Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth College, which uses Sun storage systems, suggested that the integration of storage and network management products may be just a ploy by vendors to maintain control of data centers. "Maybe they just don't want to give up control of the management platform," Dobson said.

"There's two ends that matter, and that's the user and the data," said Steve Duplessie, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass. "Data sits on storage and traverses networks to get to a user, where it becomes useful. Having those things integrated makes intuitive sense, whether you pick Smarts or OpenView or Sun."

Duplessie acknowledged that users looking at the trend from a day-to-day tactical perspective might be less interested in it. "If something works," he said, "why on earth would you fix it?"

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