Vendors square off in SAN integration challenge

See correction at end of article

Storage technology marches on. SANs are faster, easier to scale, higher performing, and more robust than ever — individually. However, the challenge of integrating multiple SANs remains vexing. Although integrated reporting and alerting is easy, it’s nearly impossible to truly merge multiple vendors’ storage networks without using invasive storage virtualization servers that add their own layer of complexity to the network.

That sums up the results of SAN management tests performed by InfoWorld at the Advanced

Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii in July. Immediately following Test Center Senior Analyst Mario Apicella’s hands-on test of the latest SAN hardware solutions from EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, the integration portion of the test began. We asked the three hardware vendors to merge all three SANs into a single SAN. We also invited Fujitsu Softek, as a hardware-agnostic storage software provider, to take part in that challenge.

“Challenge” was the operative word in this test, partially due to the complexity of the task of merging heterogeneous SANs and partially due to unexpected difficulties with the test plan. Our goal was for the vendors to offer as much functionality as they could, in terms of unifying both the administration of multiple SANs into one console, and then be able to integrate storage resources between the SANs.

True integration proved impossible for several reasons. One was the newness of some of the test hardware. The vendors hadn’t seen some of their competitors’ latest arrays yet and didn’t have drivers to support the hardware. In other cases, vendors were loath to grant their competitors unrestricted access to their cutting-edge SAN hardware.

Further, our test plan did not stipulate a “known state” that the network would be left in, so that each vendor actually faced a unique integration challenge of unraveling its competitors’ products before attempting to implement its own solution. Thus, in acknowledgement of the lack of parity in the test environment, we’ve chosen to forego scoring this test, substituting instead a checklist of features and functions demonstrated by the vendors.

But the fact remains that SAN technology hasn't evolved to the point where true integration is achievable, even under perfect conditions.

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The results: The software-based management tools that EMC and HP provided couldn’t take full control of competing SAN hardware, even when those SANs were integrated at the fabric level by tying together the FC (Fibre Channel) switches. They did offer unified administration of multiple SANs, which is helpful, but not the panacea we were seeking.