New approach to network interoperability and management

Rhapsody Networks and StoreAge Networking Technologies have teamed up with the goal of centralizing and simplifying the management of heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs). In an announcement earlier this month, the two companies said that StoreAge's Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM) will be made available on the Rhapsody family of storage application directors -- a Rhapsody product that provides additional intelligence to power solutions such as storage virtualization.

The companies say their combined solution will provide enterprise customers with a high-performance, scalable means of centrally managing heterogeneous SAN environments.

For its part, StoreAge's SVM is a network-based volume and storage management solution that provides centrally-managed storage pooling and provisioning, snapshot, data migration and data replication.

Working with Rhapsody, the SVM Agent software that normally resides on each host server attached to the SAN will be migrated to run on the Rhapsody platforms. According to the companies, this approach distributes the "point of transformation" in a virtualized SAN environment to each port in the storage application directors, allowing any attached host to utilize SVM functions.

"Moving agents off the host and putting them at the port gives end users additional flexibility in managing their host hardware," said Steve Kenniston, technology analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, the leading independent source

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of storage industry intelligence. "Virtualization as a platform in the fabric enables direct execution of storage functions, increasing performance and providing a single comprehensive management platform."

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  • Alan Earls often writes about things NAS and SAN in his weekly "SAN/NAS Update: Trends" column. View the latest

    • About the author: Alan Earls is a freelance writer in Franklin, MA.


    This was first published in September 2002

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