He cites the storage-management interface created by EMC's Fibre Alliance consortium and maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force, and notes that all the major switch vendors are working to agree on how data will move through their switches. IT managers say bigger and better Fibre Channel switches would also help. Fidelity Investments Systems Inc. in Irving, Texas, which is responsible for archiving and providing access to customer data for other parts of the financial-services firm, is looking for switches with more ports. We'd like to see some 256-port switches. Womack may get his wish.
SANs continue to attract new customers.
Dean Holland, senior AIX systems administrator for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee in Chattanooga, wants to build a SAN using BMC's tool. SAN or no SAN, Holland is concerned about disk contention. We'll no longer have to physically recable servers when we move data. And under a SAN, it will be easier to monitor and manage the entire storage environment. At least that's the way it's supposed to work.