Bluefin on the management menu

Rick Bauer knew he needed the power and speed of a storage-area network to back up the 3 terabytes of content a new online learning environment would require, but he had a few reservations about committing education dollars to a SAN.

"I wanted to make sure we weren't investing in something that, down the road, would make us an island," says Bauer, who is CIO at The Hill School, a private high school in Pottstown, Pa.

Until recently, The Hill School mostly used network-attached storage devices. And although Bauer says the idea of a high-speed SAN interconnecting disparate data storage devices appealed to him, vendor-specific management tools weren't in the budget.

"We didn't really have an incremental growth path for storage or the financial justification for a SAN," Bauer says.

But recent developments changed Bauer's mind. Encouraged in large part by the Storage Network Industry Association's (SNIA) work on a multivendor management specification, next week Bauer is rolling out a SAN at The Hill School. He will manage the SAN via Hewlett-Packard's OpenView network management software.

Because he sits on the SNIA Customer Executive Council, Bauer got a sneak peek this summer at the draft specification, dubbed Bluefin. "This wasn't slideware. These were things being hammered out," he says. "Bluefin is about real interoperability. It's more than something bolted on something for marketing."

Biting into Bluefin

Bluefin provides a method for managing, configuring and securing distributed, multivendor storage resources in a SAN via a common messaging interface. Vendors supporting Bluefin would open their APIs so storage managers could tap into management data from any compliant storage resource.

 Ultimately, open management will let customers pick and choose products from multiple vendors for their SANs, proponents say.

While efforts to develop a common management interface for storage began in 1999, only in May did that group of 17 storage vendors - called the Partner Development Process (PDP) - hand their draft specification over to SNIA for finalization.

In August, the SNIA formally accepted Bluefin, renamed it the Storage Management Interface Specification and created the Storage Management Initiative to spearhead ongoing development. SNIA aims to turn Bluefin - as it continues to be informally called - into a fully accredited standard.

The SNIA plans to demonstrate Bluefin-compliant products at the Storage Networking World conference in October. Product are expected to start shipping in early 2003.

That's good news for many enterprise users. In a recent survey of 96 network professionals attending Network World's summer seminar tour "Storage Town Meeting: Ensuring Business Continuity," 68% said they'd like to see their storage vendors comply with Bluefin. And 22% said they would insist on it.

The Bluefin base Developers bulk up the Bluefin specification by adding the best of other protocols. Storage may be a relatively new topic for the network industry, but storage managers could soon reap the benefits of more than 20 years of development in network management technology. Click here for more.

"The real dream of SANs for end users is that a set of vendors could walk in and plug SAN management into their data center, wire together all the computing and storage resources, and start the practice of sharing those resources," says Roger Reich, PDP chair and a senior technical director. "The storage industry has finally figured it out. If we don't work together, customers are not going to buy SANs."

Tough to chew

Bluefin is built on the Distributed Management Task Force's Web-based Enterprise Management initiative, which includes the Common Information Model for managing network infrastructures, along with a data model, a transport mechanism that uses HTTP and encoding that uses XML. By tying these tools together, Bluefin would help storage administrators collect and view data from different vendors' storage resources in the same format, and ideally, would let storage managers manipulate SANs from a centralized location.

Bluefin, installed as agent software or software on a proxy server, would let management software retrieve data and take the necessary action to reallocate resources or lock down a device when multiple applications are trying to access the device (see story, "The Bluefin base").  For example, Bluefin agent software in a host bus adapter would enable a storage application to discover, manage and control the adapter's resources and apply them where needed throughout the SAN.

While Bluefin looks good on paper, some industry watchers aren't sure how it will work in practice. They wonder how far vendors will go to interoperate and are worried that some vendors will tack extensions onto the specification that would let them better manage and differentiate their storage products. Doing so would obviously make multivendor management more difficult, and the idea of a common management interface is still elusive.

Others are worried that Bluefin will not provide adequate management capabilities. That's the concern of Chris Bartram, senior HPe3000 systems administrator and a consultant for the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C. While not familiar with Bluefin, Bartram says he's worried a "common denominator" provided by standards-based tools would "dumb down" management interfaces.

"I'd be worried that we'd lose access to some of the differentiating factors that caused us to choose one vendor's product over another's in the first place," Bartram says. But he adds that he would be interested in seeing network management companies such as HP and IBM Tivoli adopt Bluefin if it does become a standard. Then SAN management simply could become an add-on module, he says.

Other industry watchers think Bluefin stops short in supporting only SANs. "The industry has to recognize that storage is storage no matter what the line protocol looks like," says Bob Zimmerman, a vice president at Giga Information Group. He says the type of network - Fibre Channel, Ethernet, TCP/IP - shouldn't matter to a common storage management interface. But Bluefin could eventually be extended to support network- or server-attached storage devices, Reich contends.

Yet, Zimmerman says he's excited by Bluefin's potential to give users broader access to their storage resources, to give them more flexibility in purchasing product, to reduce their management costs and to help them more efficiently use their storage capacity.

The Hill School's Bauer is hooked on those promises.

"I look on with anticipation, and I'm probably not going to be the first customer," Bauer says. "Yet I was amazed at the specifics Bluefin seemed to address. Maybe the talk and hyperbole of two years ago has given way to reality."

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