Easing Storage Management Headaches

Computerworld - As the amount of data on MasterCard International Inc.'s storage-area network (SAN) has grown over the past three years, managing those storage components and associated applications has been a challenge. The Purchase, N.Y.-based financial services company hopes someday to use a single storage management system that will allow it to plug in products from different vendors in order to get best-of-breed products at the most competitive prices.

"The struggle is trying to convince the different storage vendors, whether it's Sun, EMC or IBM," that IT managers don't want to stay with one particular vendor's products for everything, says Jim Hull, vice president of engineering services at MasterCard.

"I'm pretty selfish. I want to get whatever's the best for MasterCard, and I want to be able to plug and play the best from EMC, Sun, IBM, DataCore or whoever it may be," Hull says.

Vendor Foot-Dragging

For several years, users have been pressuring storage vendors to adopt standards and share their application program interfaces (API) more freely so that multivendor networks can interoperate seamlessly and in a more automated way. But users say vendors are dragging their feet in more widely disseminating their APIs and in adopting new standards.

"Do I think that vendors go out of their way to make interoperability happen? Not really. Especially vendors like IBM and EMC," says William Ubelacker, director of systems services at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. in Burlington, N.J.

"We spend a lot of our time improving interoperability on end-to-end configurations, but trying to cover the waterfront on all configurations a customer asks for is sort of an open-ended equation," counters Clodoaldo Barrera, director of technology strategy for IBM's Storage Systems Group. He says that the real problem has been a lack of standards clear enough to guarantee product interoperability.

"We're open to swapping APIs with any vendor out there," says EMC Corp. spokesman Adrian Ragasta. He says EMC has been pushing the industry's interoperability levels with its Widesky initiative, aimed at tying together multivendor storage networks through API-sharing partnerships. EMC's AutoIS software suite is at the heart of that effort.

Although storage management tools are growing in sophistication, with features such as policy-based storage allocation, automated backup, mirroring and snapshots, IT managers like Ubelacker say they want to be able to manage all those features from a single console on a single platform, such as IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, Veritas Software Corp.'s Veritas Foundation Suite or Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC's ControlCenter/Open Edition. They also want to be able to plug in software from any other vendors—whether industry leaders or start-up companies—and still control it through that same interface.