Vendors push for open storage mgmt.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - A consortium of 17 of the leading storage-area network vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Dell, Computer Associates and IBM, has submitted a proposal for a standards-based, heterogeneous management of Fibre Channel devices that analysts say is a huge technology leap for managing any vendor's storage device.

Dubbed Bluefin, the specification was given to the Storage Network Industry Association with the hope that SNIA would push a standard out quickly.

Bluefin is based on the same Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative and includes the same Common Information Model (CIM) data model and transport mechanism that the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) recommends for managing network and storage devices.

For several years, users have relied on proprietary management software supplied by the vendor of their storage device.

For standards, they have only had SNMP, which discovered, monitored and performed limited configuration, but which wasn't hefty enough to take the place of the proprietary software and manage any storage array or switch, regardless of vendor implementation.

"SNMP doesn't provide anywhere near the level of detail required to discover, monitor and configure storage devices," says Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing at Storability, a company that provides storage management software and services.

But WBEM and CIM, when combined with proprietary management packages from storage vendors, will let users configure, manage and redeploy storage devices, irrespective of vendor, analysts say.

"Bluefin is good to the extent that we have a standard that is at least moving in the right direction," says Jamie Gruener, senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "Right now though, without WBEM/CIM, we have no way to achieve heterogeneous management with all the proprietary vendor APIs [such as EMC's WideSky] out there."

Observers expect that Bluefin will be like many other standards, for which building to the lowest common denominator rules. They expect vendors will continue to bolt on existing proprietary APIs that let their customers manage a specific storage vendor's boxes better.

According to an EMC spokesman, that is exactly what the storage giant will do - use WBEM/CIM as a framework for management, with WideSky extensions that manage the company's Symmetrix better.

"We'll take Bluefin and make it a part of WideSky," says Mike O'Malley, an EMC spokesman. "Bluefin and CIM only address one piece of the pie. With luck, going forward they will address more, but right now WideSky does things that Bluefin doesn't."

A bigger problem than heterogeneous storage management is the standardization process, Gruener says.

"The [Bluefin] vendors are going through a relatively paralyzed standards body [SNIA]," Gruener says. He adds that an organization such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which can accelerate the standardization, should take over for SNIA's inadequacies.

SNIA originally submitted a CIM-based storage proposal to the DMTF in 1999; until this spring, when demonstrations of CIM-managed storage took place at Storage Networking World, little has happened with CIM under SNIA's supervision. That is unlike the iSCSI and Fibre Channel over IP specifications, which were submitted directly to the IETF in 2000; they are expected to achieve standards status this year.