It is believed that management tools must be able to work at previously unheard of scale on a hierarchic, peer to peer, and overlapping spheres of control basis. This is essential to reflect the global aspirations of SAN for large national and international businesses. This management capability must be policy driven, and must manage by exception, automate the vast majority of operations, exhibit no single point of failure, and enable 'on the fly' changes of storage, server, network, software and other components. Further, the operating environment must be open and scalable, standards based, exhibit uniform and easy to use management, and be optimized for global access to storage. Tools must exist for prediction analysis and pre-emptive management, as well as tools for visualization, trend analysis and capacity planning.
Feedback is essential.
Mechanisms will include direct customer collaboration, customer advisory groups, user groups and other means.