Vixel Opens SAN Management Software to Others' Devices
Vixel Corp. opened up its SAN management software to support devices from other vendors. The company says its SAN InSite 2000 is the first application to support multivendor SAN devices and offer interoperability with other vendor components.
Brett Oxenhandler, senior software product marketing manager at Vixel (www.vixel.com), says the company tried to address customer feedback with elements of this release.
"We’re addressing six issues we found from talking to customers," he says.
Those issues include interoperability, comprehensive management, multivendor SAN device support, compliance with open standards, integration with management frameworks, and remote management.
Vixel’s SAN InSite 2000's open architecture lets administrators autodiscover, monitor, and manage the entire SAN interconnect through a single interface.
Further, SAN InSite integrates into larger framework management products, such as HP OpenView and Tivoli. Oxenhandler says this integration helps IT workers manage all aspects of the enterprise, including LAN, WAN, and SAN devices.
SAN InSite 2000 supports all Vixel SAN devices, as well as devices from Agilent Technologies Inc. (www.agilent.com), Ancor Communications Inc. (www.ancor.com), Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (www.brocade.com), Crossroads Systems Inc. (www.crossroads.com), Emulex Corp. (www.emulex.com), Gadzoox Networks Inc. (www.gadzoox.com), Interphase Corp. (www.interphase.com), JNI Corp. (www.jni.com), and QLogic Corp. (www.qlogic.com).
Oxenhandler points out that support is not limited to the listed devices. "Any device with implemented support for Fibre Alliance MIB will be recognized by SAN InSite," he says.
SAN InSite 2000 supports available open standards, including Common Information Model (CIM), XML, HTML, SNMP, CORBA, SCSI Enclosure Services (SES), Management Server, Fibre Alliance Management Information Base (MIB), and Standard Fibre Alliance .dll for HBA devices. These standards are used by SAN InSite 2000 for in-band and out-of-band discovery and device communication of SAN devices.
"We were forced, in a good way I think, to support all the standards for HBAs because there are no solid standards yet," Oxenhandler says.
By incorporating each standard into SAN InSite 2000, Vixel is able to manage other vendor devices and provide a wider communication flow to storage and enterprise management applications.
SAN InSite is platform independent, supporting Windows 2000, NT 4.0, Sun Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX.
The software allows IT managers to automatically discover multivendor SAN devices in the enterprise and then render a topology map of the SAN devices. From the topology map users can display how the SAN devices are connected, physically and logically; individual SAN device and Consolidated Site Health; the interconnection between the topology and directory views to ease navigation; performance and information from the links of the SAN device.
Users can also configure zoning of a SAN switch or hub graphically within the topology screen view, while in Logical Mode, which includes the capability to define and schedule zoning tasks when the update occurs.
"SAN InSite 2000 addresses the IT customers' need for centralized, cohesive management of multiple vendor's SAN components," said Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corp. (www.sresearch.com), in a statement.