T-11 promises better SAN management
by Rick Cook
The ANSI T-11 committee's efforts to standardize the information needed to manage SANs are already beginning to bear fruit. Even though a standard hasn't been formally adopted yet, products using the proposed standards are already starting to appear. Tivoli has announced that its latest version of its Storage Network Manager incorporates the T-11 SAN discovery and management standards.
Although SAN manufacturers make much of the information needed for effective management available today, there is no standard for presenting or discovering the information. This seriously hampers efforts to manage SANs in a vendor-neutral manner. The T-11 committee's Fibre Channel Methodologies for Interconnects (FC-MI) is trying to solve this problem by laying out the information and APIs that hardware should support.
For example, the Host-Bus Adapter (HBA) API specifies a range of items -- from the HBA serial number, make and model to its condition -- that the HBA will report when properly queried. Unlike the CIM standard, the HBA API is fairly low-level and aimed at letting management software know the nature and conditions of the HBAs and similar devices attached to the SAN.
More information on the T-11 committee's efforts is available at its Web site.
Rick Cook has been writing about mass storage since the days when the term meant an 80K floppy disk. The computers he learned on used ferrite cores and magnetic drums. For the last twenty years he has been a freelance writer specializing in storage and other computer issues.
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Related Book
Storage Area Networks: Designing and Implementing a Mass Storage System, 1/e
Author : Ralph Thornburgh
Barry Schoenborn
Publisher : Prentice Hall
ISBN/CODE : 0130279595
Cover Type : Soft Cover
Pages : 300
Published : Sep 2000
Summary:
The complete guide to SAN technology for every implementer and manager!
Every month, enterprises require more information, delivered faster, with greater reliability--and traditional data storage methods no longer suffice. Enter the Storage Area Network (SAN), which can store enormous amounts of data, serve it at lightning speed, scale to meet accelerating growth, and deliver unprecedented reliability. Now, there's a complete guide to SAN technology for every IT professional and decision-maker. Storage Area Networks covers it all: key concepts, components, applications, implementation examples, management, and much more.
