HP, Symantec SRM wares hit on discovery, inventory tasks

Storage resource management means many things to many people, vendors and IT folks alike. In theory it covers everything from autodiscovering storage-area network devices to alerting and reporting on enterprisewide storage trends; from providing specific inventory control measures to supplying comprehensive management for the entire SAN; from enabling storage capacity management to assisting in information life-cycle management and storage-provisioning tasks.

In this Clear Choice test we targeted products that cover most of these storage-management bases in a heterogeneous environment. To that end, we sought to include the following products: Brocade's Fabric Manager, Cisco's Fabric Manager, CA's StoreAge, Commvault's Storage Manager, EMC's SAN Manager, Hitachi's HiCommand Storage Services Manager, HP's Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition, IBM/Tivoli's Storage Manager, Softek's Storage Manager and Symantec's Veritas CommandCentral Storage.

Only HP and Symantec took up the gauntlet. Hitachi's software runs only on its hardware, and company officials said they didn't have a system small enough (less than 7U) to meet our lab criteria. EMC said it has a new version of its product coming out in early 2007 and may let us test that when it's available. Commvault said its product has more of a focus on backup storage software. Brocade agreed to participate but then changed its mind and pulled out of the test before sending the product to our lab. The rest declined to participate.

Overall, HP's Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition scored slightly higher than Symantec's Veritas CommandCentral Storage to earn the Clear Choice award, though the differences between the two are slight. HP supports more devices on the SAN, particularly in the area of storage from smaller vendors such as Xiotech and 3Par. HP is also more scalable, in large part because of its underlying Oracle database.

Symantec has a simpler installation process (see installation story), with a single product to install rather than three, but may not be as scalable in large installations, because the database isn't set up on a separate server (this would only be an issue in very large SANs).

Veritas CommandCentral Storage's ability to gather information via the command-line interfaces of storage devices and switches is more of a chore to configure but allows the administrator to add unsupported devices by adding the commands for those devices manually. Because both products are comparable in starting price at $25,000 for Symantec's and $30,000 for HP's, the biggest dividing line for administrators will be which supports more of the devices in use at your organization.

These management systems are complex. They comprise management software as well as agents running on storage-attached servers with various operating systems. They include a database for storing performance statistics on storage and SAN use, and information on the number and types of files, as well as optional applications that provide services, such as virtualization, and the ability to collect data from enterprise applications, such as Exchange or databases. The SANs they monitor and manage can be equally diverse, including host bus adapters (HBA), Fibre Channel switches, storage subsystems, the operating systems on the servers attached to the storage, and possibly even applications accessing the storage. (See details about how our test bed was built.)