IT professionals responsible for managing storage-area networks face a daunting challenge. Storage today is an integral element in the interconnected IT-service delivery chain, and applications are spread across multiple arrays, switches and servers, often from different vendors.

In such heterogeneous environments, the old device-centric approach to SAN management is limited. More comprehensive, vendor-neutral tools are needed that complement traditional storage resource management (SRM) tools.

This need was highlighted in a recent Gartner "Magic Quadrant" report on SRM and SAN-management software that noted: "Consolidation in the storage management market has resulted in suites of products that, while providing a large number of features, still lack specific capabilities that customers need." It goes on to say, "Keeping critical applications running requires consistent data access. This puts pressure on IT and storage administrators to ensure capacity availability, quick recovery and proactive infrastructure management."

Click to see: Holistic SAN management

A new class of SAN-management tools is emerging to address the challenge of assuring application performance in mixed storage environments. These tools focus on managing SANs' application-level performance, not just device-level performance. This lets IT departments manage SANs according to applications' service level and allocate storage resources appropriately based on how critical each application is.

The challenge requires tools that provide a global, application-level view of all SAN resources, letting IT departments:

* Verify the present state of the storage services supporting an application, including capacity, access and recoverability; also provide early detection of latent quality problems to avoid outages.

* Record the past for easier troubleshooting, auditing and reporting.

* Predict the future to better plan data migration and consolidation and capacity-forecasting.

These capabilities in turn let IT managers address a range of day-to-day storage-management challenges:

* Change management: providing a real-time, global SAN view from an application standpoint, which is critical to ensuring infrastructure changes do not affect application performance.

* Capacity planning: providing insight on storage use by application, as well as information on switch use and server loads, which affect the distribution of load across storage arrays.