Others are designed to meet more general storage requirements. Computer Associates International Inc.'s ARCserveIT Enterprise Edition offers built-in SAN management capability via the company's Unicenter TNG Framework. SANsymphony from DataCore Software Corp. provides enterprise-level network storage pooling across heterogeneous SAN components. IBM, pre-eminent among providers of integrated SAN products with its own brand of servers and storage units, has Tivoli SANergy File Sharing, software that enables the sharing of SAN arrays, file systems and files across multiple systems. The company plans to release other SAN software products later this year.
SANs represent the near future of network storage technology.
Consider signing on with an application service provider or systems integrator if your SAN requirements are large. Fibre Channel is the preferred technology for SAN architectures. Good software is the key to SAN management. Buy your SAN components only from a recognized Fibre Channel hub, switch or host bus adapter manufacturer. SAN software must account for a large number of components and a multitude of physical and logical relationships between them.