What impact will iSCSI have on management software applications? Will data that used to fall under the purview of storage management applications now "revert" back to network management apps? How is all of this data going to be managed?
Thanks for your insight.
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There are three areas to manage in storage networks.
1) The network. This is traditional network management. Although for storage there is an additional "pathing" application component that is considerably different than anything found in IP networks.
2) The block level storage stuff. This will still be done by volume managers and device virtualization.
3) The file system and data objects. This will still be done by file system and database tools.
So the answer is there will be three different types of management - just as there are today. When those things can be integrated together remains to be seen, but don't hold your breath. The closest thing is storage resource management (SRM) but that doesn't cover the network side. (I don't think so anyway.)
This was first published in May 2001