Storability's Global Storage Manager provides a view of a worldwide network, Brocade's latest eight-port switch costs less than $8,000 and ramps up to 2 Gbps, and NetOctave will change storage security forever.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [March 7, 2002]

Storability announced that its in-house software, called Global Storage Manager, is now for sale. Founded in 2000, the company started out as a Managed Service Provider (MSP). "We had a different business model from the traditional SSP," said Kirby Wadsworth, chief strategist and vice president of marketing for Storability, "we never rented capacity like a utility. Instead, we managed equipment that customers own from two Network Operation Centers (NOCs), one in Boston and one in London."

The company developed its own technology for managing different vendors' equipment on a single software platform. The software is designed to provide a wide variety of reports, from an eagle's eye view of an entire network, down to the usage of a specific application or device.

Storability's Navigator view

An early adopter of Storability's software, Compaq is hoping to use the latest release to build a storage service. Frank Orlando, manager of business development at Compaq's Storage Solutions Division, told us "We were one of the first to work with Storability a couple of years ago when they were a fledgling company. We have an announced agreement to remarket their software as a service offering. We were particularly impressed by how they structured their security, allowing administrators at a large enterprise to restrict employees' access to segments of the SAN by geographical location or organizational function. And you should really take a look at their Graphical User Interface (GUI). It's amazing."

"With just a couple of mouse clicks," said Wadsworth, "a tech can drill down to the most minute level of information. We show people how much storage capacity they have, where it is, what applications are using it, the path through the Host Bus Adapter (HBA), through the switch to the storage device (if that's their setup), and even which firmware revision is running on the device."

Built in the real world, the software tests for errors that SSPs need to watch for, such as backup jobs that failed—when and where they failed. Furthermore, storability has developed middleware that lets administrators interact directly with storage devices through a command line interface. Administrators can interact with applications by using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) or Java Native Interface (JNI).

Wadsworth claimed, "we created a complete solution, from backup to support to mirroring (we let you see what's mirrored, but other software actually does the mirroring). In designing the software, we focused on three areas: increased utilization, expense reduction, and availability."

Increase utilization: Wadsworth said that when Storability first visits a customer site, the customer is typically using about 40 to 50 percent of their storage capacity. After they install Global Storage Manager, they can see where their storage is and what applications are using it. The new view enables more efficient utilization and can also clarify storage decisions. "If you've got a non-clustered mail server backing up to your most expensive, fully featured storage device, and you suddenly see that, you may well decide that other applications are more critical and decide to backup mail to a cheaper device," said Wadsworth.

Reduce expense: The instant storage network view that Global Storage Manager provides should simplify and speed many tasks. "Say you're walking around your physical plant every three months for quarterly reports to take a physical inventory. With Global Storage Manager, you'll still do that, but you'll do it once each year," said Wadsworth. "Here's another example. In a traditional network, customer provisioning can take three or four hours because network admins have to figure out the paths for all of the new devices. Our software can cut provisioning time down to four or five minutes. You can see how we're simplifying all tasks."

Provide higher availability: The software immediately generates a report if any backup job fails to run successfully. The software is application-aware so that users, for example, could find out what storage is associated with their Oracle application—and find out whether the storage is enterprise class, modular, or unprotected, as well as viewing mirroring, if any. "People can fix problems before they spread," said Wadsworth, "and because of that, the database administrator, the systems administrator, and even the CIO will sleep better at night."

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