The Bluefin base

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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.

The Storage Network Industry Association's proposed Bluefin specification looks to address managing and securing distributed storage resources across a storage-area network (SAN) via a common messaging interface. It has a strong base in existing Desktop Management Task Force (SMTF) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developments.

Bluefin is built on the DMTF's Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, which includes the Common Information Model (CIM) 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 goes beyond the open management capabilities found in the IETF's longstanding and much-used Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)."It's the level of control that's different here," says Bob Zimmerman, a vice president at Giga Information Group.

While SNMP passively monitors, the Bluefin specification aims at giving administrators management control over their SANs. Storage vendors are promising to include detailed data on how to manage their specific devices.

"To really manage a SAN, you need a vendor-specific parser for each and every message. Bluefin proposes to eliminate that - that's if the vendors give up their APIs," Zimmerman says.

For security, Bluefin developers included the IETF's HTTP digest access authentication and transport layer security protocol. These ensure only authorized users or applications can mess with the SAN configuration.

And Bluefin supports the IETF service location protocol for discovery and configuration of network devices and capabilities, or something called lock management. This feature would restrict two applications from querying a storage resource at the same time, which would prevent potential problems. If two applications queried a device simultaneously, inaccurate information could be delivered, the queries could overlap and cancel each other out or configuration could be off because of the dual efforts.

"Bluefin seems to be offering an enormous amount of technology on which to build and manage SANs," says Michael Karp, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. "If it works, it will make life much easier for many people."

- Denise Dubie