I was at the UK Storage Management Forum yesterday, in many ways a misnomer as it is EMC and Control Center focussed. Now ECC is a good tool although everyone seems to have issues keeping it stable and responsive, DCPs seem to be the bane of every ECC implementation but it gets better every release.
However, it seems that the nirvana of a universal provisioning tool is a long way off; at one point EMC did appear to be starting down the road of putting in the capability to manage third party arrays. By manage, I mean configure and provision; it seems that EMC are taking a step back placing all the focus for 3rd party arrays on simply monitoring them. I don't really blame them but it's a pity as it means that Storage Teams are still going to have to live with multiple tools to manage the environment.
So is there any light on the horizon? At one point, I had hopes that Onaro might produce something but not sure where NetApp are going to take that. They certainly seem to gone a bit into stealth mode and Onaro really relied on a good ECC implementation to work; I still remember conversations with them where they claimed to be agentless, not really true, they just were parasitic and sucked their information from everyone else's agents. But it had potential, unfortunately NetApp seem to be 'doing a Sun' and killing a product.
So who else? I've not looked at IBM's offering for a long while, it must have got better (it couldn't have got worse!). Hi-Command, Storage Essentials? What else is out there? Anyone got any suggestions?
Martin, thank you for the post and comments about Onaro and NetApp.
I was one of the Onaro co-founders and am currently responsible for SANscreen product management at NetApp. While you might not be seeing quite as much SANscreen-independent messaging in the marketplace these days, I wanted to assure you that the product is alive and is in fact thriving here at NetApp.
NetApp acquired Onaro because the SANscreen product adds tremendous value in heterogeneous storage management. The vision, strategy, and product have not changed at all – in fact NetApp has increased investment in SANscreen to make it the best heterogeneous solution on the market. We are about to release SANscreen version 5.0 (December 08) which includes new array performance support for EMC, HDS, as well as extended NetApp support, new iSCSI support, a plug-in for VMware VCenter, a CMDB-ready data warehouse and a robust customized reporting engine that will allow customers to report on capacity, utilization, performance, and availability across their end-to-end, global, heterogeneous environments.
Best regards,
Assaf