SANavigator boosts storage mgmt. pkg.
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SANavigator is enhancing its storage resource management software, which lets network professionals eliminate performance bottlenecks by helping plan, configure and monitor storage- area networks.
SANavigator 3.0 adds three features: performance monitoring, a SAN planning tool and remote access from a Palm handheld. It has been redesigned from a monolithic Java program to a client-server architecture, which frees up memory on management workstations and installs more easily.
The performance monitoring feature lets storage managers click on any link between two devices and show how much bandwidth is being used by data transferred between the devices. Network professionals can set thresholds on links, which when exceeded will trigger alerts to e-mail, a pager or to a systems and network management framework such as Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG. The performance monitor also lets storage managers perform a ping on two Fibre Channel devices to see the latency between the two devices.
SANavigator, the company, was spun out last month from Connex, which started as a subsidiary of long-time adapter vendor Western Digital.
The company's product, SANavigator, discovers storage devices from a variety of vendors and the connections be-tween them in a SAN. It supports switches from Brocade, Vixel, McData, QLogic and Gadzoox, and host bus adapters from JNI, Emulex and QLogic.
"SANavigator lets you grab bandwidth numbers off of your SAN fabric and lets you determine how slowly devices are running or not running," says Hoot Thompson, CTO for integrator Tatuxent Technology Group in Columbia, Md. "You're setting up a Fibre Channel network to deliver data at a certain rate. If you are not doing so, you want a quick way of finding that out in a manner that you can dig in and find out whether it's the fabric, the client or the storage device."
The SAN planning tool is a Microsoft Visio-like design utility that lets network professionals create, configure and document SANs electronically and export the drawings to another interface such as Visio. The SAN tool also lets network managers perform rules-checking to identify single points of failure.
SANavigator can be remotely monitored via Palm devices.
Gartner projects revenue for the storage resource management software market to grow from $4.2 billion in 1999 to $14.7 billion in 2004.
SANavigator is priced by the number of switch or router ports. A version for a SAN with 32 Fibre Channel ports would be $7,500. SANavigator is shipping now for Windows NT, Windows 2000, Linux Red Hat 6.2, Solaris and Hewlett-Packard UX.
SANavigator: www.sanavigator.com.
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