Anew generation of storage resource management (SRM) products is flooding the market, all promising ROI by translating business objectives into finely tuned storage policies that can control storage resources.
But most storage managers are jaded, tired of being itemized to death for product features that are missing from a vendor's basic SRM offering. Storage managers need inclusive SRM applications that allow the definition of policies and provide control of the storage resources governed by those policies.
Veritas Software Corp.'s CommandCentral Storage (CCS) 4.0 is a comprehensive SRM program that raises the bar by integrating many management points into a single console. CCS rolls up the feature sets of SANPoint Control and Storage Reporter into a far-reaching solution that discovers storage resources, and allows administrators to manage and provision policy-based heterogeneous storage.
In June and July of 2003, I compared EMC Corp.'s ControlCenter and Veritas' SANPoint Control. At that time, ControlCenter barely nosed out SANPoint Control, but with CommandCentral Storage, Veritas SRM has upped the ante.
Among the new or enhanced features in CCS 4.0 are:
- The ability to pool resources into a single entity for the application of commands and policy.
- Centralized deployment of configuration changes to one or more storage resources.
- Extended support for Veritas and Microsoft clusters.
- Application-centric monitoring and provisioning of storage.
- Host bus adapter (HBA) replacement wizard.
- Role-based access rights and single sign on.
