Storage Area Network: Architecture

SAN Management

Proper SAN management is an essential part of SAN health. SAN management software allows you to always know where your data resides and the status of the underlying storage systems. Using this knowledge, you can reallocate capacity, monitor, analyze, and tune performance to optimize overall capabilities of not only storage systems, but servers and applications as well.

Event Monitoring

Event monitoring automatically notifies an administrator when storage events occur such as a failure or status change. Notification can be in the form of e-mail, fax, or the paging of selected personnel. Event monitoring software can be easily programmed to launch custom applications after an event occurs.

Analysis Tools

Analysis tools enable you to investigate performance patterns and trends in normal operation mode, as well as in benchmarks and performance tests. It helps to find performance bottlenecks in the storage enterprise, which can be addressed by fine-tuning parameters of disk arrays or by adding hardware components, such as cache memory or disks. You can connect to multiple hosts and collect performance data from disk arrays connected to each host in the enterprise. Analysis tools also allow you to investigate performance patterns and trends before a problem occurs and assist in capacity planning and intelligent load balancing.

Third Party Integration

Some enterprise networks have standardized on a certain management framework such as Tivoli or CA (Computer Associates) UniCenter TNG. This integration allows the management software to be seamlessly included in the enterprise management framework of any organization standardized on popular industry solutions.