New tools are on the way to help you clean up your storage mess
 
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ORLANDO - Storage vendors are finally heeding the cries of enterprise customers who want single-view management tools that can corral their unruly collections of incompatible storage arrays, devices and applications.
Whether these new "open storage management frameworks" from the likes of EMC and Hitachi Data Systems will be easy enough to use to justify wide deployment remains an open question, industry experts say.
"All [storage] companies are trying to do the exact same thing," says Dwight Gibbs, an IT executive for The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Va.
That rush to open frameworks should be a boon for customers, Gibbs adds.
"Once this software works, it will commoditize the hardware, and prices will fall through the floor," he says. "At that point you'll have one pool of storage, and you can go to any vendor."
Among those jockeying to meet this management need:
While welcoming the trend toward open management systems, analysts and users are wary of whether the tools will be used any more efficiently than systems management products from the likes of Tivoli Systems/IBM or CA.
"If I could use one tool kit to manage all my storage in totality and optimize my storage pool, that's great," says Gibbs, who has Compaq StorageWorks, EMC and Network Appliance storage. "All my CIO wants to hear now is how I am going to cut my budget or increase our revenue. If I can go to my CIO and say, 'Let's hold off on buying $50,000 of storage because I have this $10,000 tool,' that makes an excellent case."
But these frameworks may well be easier hyped than executed, others warn.
"If these management tools require a lot of heavy lifting, it will become shelfware," says James Gruener, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "If it is too hard to use, the user is going to say 'I have better things to do.'"
EMC executives are confident their announcement this week points them in the right direction. The components being released are:
The browser-based Enterprise ControlCenter/Open Edition also wisely bundles software that IT is familiar with, such as EMC's TimeFinder and Symmetric Remote Data Facility, making adoption easier, Gruener says.
In addition to ease-of-use questions on the customer end, analysts cite concerns about these open management frameworks. Because these packages will work with any vendors' hardware or software, there is the risk of commoditizing the hardware, thus alienating developers. The second - and bigger concern - is that there are few existing standards or industry-standard APIs that let storage hardware and software work together.
"Every vendor has its own proprietary approach, APIs and point products that solve a particular problem and have to be integrated in a specific fashion. The Storage Network Industry Association should define APIs for discovery, data virtualization, backup and recovery," Gruener says.
Although EMC declined to comment on the APIs that WildSky uses other than to say they are based on the company's 4-year-old E-Infostructure Developers Program, several sources indicated they are EMC-specific. The APIs in Hitachi's HiCommand also are proprietary.
EMC's Enterprise ControlCenter/Open Edition components are available priced by capacity. For instance, if a customer has 14 terabytes of data, StorageScope would cost $50,000. The ControlCenter Console is included in that cost. Hitachi's and BMC's products are also based on terabyte capacity.
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