The buzz around "SAN-based intelligence" has sparked a lot of interest, according to recent polls of storage administrators. In spite of the dearth of real products, the major fabric infrastructure vendors and storage equipment vendors have been posturing to capture mind share and the perception of leadership. But is there real value and viable solutions to SAN storage management headaches in this so-called network-based "intelligence"? The SAN storage management puzzle today consists of many pieces including resource discovery, capacity planning, performance and availability tuning, provisioning, backup and recovery, disaster protection, and change management. Since data growth and application requirements are expanding so quickly, storage management can become a cosdy and painfully vicious cycle. Today's tools consist of host-based software such as volume managers, and array-based services like replication that don't work cooperatively together. Also, these services usually only work between homoge- neous host-servers or storage systems locking users into a particular vendor with a specific roadmap. Keeping up with the plethora of management interfaces, software versions, and configurations only adds to the management complexity.
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