Managing the exponential increase in enterprise data requirements into the future will mean extending the SAN management infrastructures of today to a new level of storage management known as Storage Area Management (SAM).

Storage Area Management, or SAM, refers to an overall process—some call it a series of best practices—for implementing end-to-end management solutions that address the entire storage network as a single entity. It involves centralized data and resource management across storage domains, providing shared services to groups of servers and their applications.

To envision what lies ahead, it's important to understand the history of SAN management and the rapid evolution of management capabilities. While current applications primarily focus on device management, future offerings will address data management through a wide range of advanced capabilities provided by integrated, automated solutions.

The evolution from SAN management capabilities to SAM can be divided into three distinct stages:

• Stage 1: Device discovery
  SAN management initially consisted of identifying basic information about individual devices and presenting the information under a common view using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to communicate between devices. During this stage of SAN development, seemingly simple tasks still required complex processes. For example, allocating storage required a serial connection to the management tool of each component and a series of steps for managing each device.
  
  
• Stage 2: Logical, integrated applications
  The next stage of SAN management provided a sophisticated new infrastructure that masked the underlying complexities of SAN management and enabled applications to perform tasks transparently. The processes of discovering, building, and maintaining relationships between components no longer had to be embedded in the applications. Instead, these processes were automated in a single subsystem (the fabric) that communicated this complex information to a variety of applications.
  
  
• Stage 3: Intelligent services and the emergence of SAM
  To support growth and ensure scalability, today’s storage environments must be able to utilize an extensive set of services that are logically connected into an overall management ecosystem. This approach goes beyond centralization and automation. To provide intelligent services, applications rely on the intelligent fabric infrastructure and policies based on device intelligence. The ability to schedule a policy-driven backup at a specific time is an example of this capability.

Figure 1. Brocade enables the SAM framework Powerful management is the key to maximizing the benefits of SAN solutions. Today’s SAN management applications can directly control functions such as:

• Device discovery: automatically identifies the devices that are logged onto the fabric and reports basic information about their attributes.
• Health monitoring: provides real-time information about the status, state, events, and condition of the fabric; also assists in identifying the root cause of problems and proactively alerting administrators to potential problems before they occur.
• Performance monitoring: provides real-time statistics and thresholds for port, switch, fabric, and other Fibre Channel metrics, including SCSI commands (reads, writes, read/writes), protocol performance, and CRC error rates.
• Device zoning: provides the ability to automatically or dynamically arrange devices into logical groups (zones) and protects them with hardware-enforced access control lists.
• Path performance: monitors network traffic performance characteristics across the route from a source to a destination.
• Switch control: performs administrative tasks such as switch configuration, switch online/offline, and port enable/disable functions.

Through the use of a common Application Programming Interface (API), today’s SAN management applications are quickly being joined by new value-added enterprise-wide solutions that enable:

• Visualization: provides a graphical representation of SAN fabrics by using techniques such as topology rendering.
• Automatic provisioning: provides automated storage resource allocation based on defined policies, rules, and procedures.
• Policy automation: ensures the consistent propagation of fabric-wide policies to the various components in a SAN.
• Quality of Service (QoS): monitors and enforces predictable service levels through network traffic prioritization and bandwidth reservation.
• Security: provides a trusted, reliable, and secure policy-based SAN environment that is protected from unauthorized access or disruption.
• Capacity management: enables the planning and optimization of storage resources to support specific user requirements and business needs.

This transformation involves moving beyond point management solutions to true end-to-end data management—from the SAN infrastructure all the way to the applications. This all-encompassing, end-to-end management approach is the essence of SAM.

Preparing SANs to support SAM capabilities involves ensuring that the following building blocks are in place:

• An intelligent storage area network with a distributed fabric operating system.
• Hardware-enabled advanced fabric services including device discovery, automated configuration, end-to-end performance monitoring, real time health monitoring, hardware-enforced zoning, legacy loop support, and policy-based security.
• Open management tools that simplify SAN administration.
• A highly developed API that supports a rich set of functionality and the development of third-party applications that enable functions like auto-provisioning, health and performance monitoring, policy management, and virtualization.
• Well-integrated and tested product solutions that offer the assurance of proven interoperability for end-to-end SAN management and Storage Resource Management (SRM).

According to Gartner Research, storage area management will continue to gain increased exposure within the industry and will have a profound effect on the way enterprise organizations structure their IT groups. Many organizations are creating the role of a SAM architect who plans the storage strategy across the enterprise. In addition, IT organizations are establishing dedicated storage management teams within their infrastructure groups with skill sets in data networking, storage resource management, and disaster recovery planning.