NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: ANNE SKAMAROCK on
STORAGE
01/29/02
Today's focus: Policy-based automatic provisioning

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* Introducing InterSAN's Pathline
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: Policy-based automatic provisioning

By Anne Skamarock

Those who read my articles regularly, know how I feel about the
lack of interaction between storage infrastructure management
point products and the applications that use the storage in a
heterogeneous environment. InterSAN is addressing this issue
with its recently announced Pathline product.

Today, there are products available that can easily discover
all the components on a storage-area network (SAN) and create a
map of the components for administrators to visualize. Many of
these products provide environment-monitoring capabilities much
like the popular network frameworks. However, given a problem
these products cannot take anything but the simplest course of
action because they have no interaction or knowledge of the
applications using the infrastructure.  This requires an expert
administrator or two or three...

InterSAN's Pathline product solves this problem. Released for
general availability last month, Pathline provides the
automated discovery, topology rendering, and event management
described above and goes beyond that. The product ties in the
application to manage the relationship between the application
and the data path through policy-based automatic provisioning.

Well, what does policy-based automatic provisioning mean? When
storage is being allocated for an application, the
administrator will either select an existing policy or create
one specifically for that application. That policy defines the
quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the application.  Once
the policy has been chosen, Pathline creates the optimal data
path, which InterSAN calls a Virtual Private Data Path (VPD),
from the application to the storage where the application data
resides. The SAN infrastructure components are configured
automatically, without requiring administrator interaction at
the component level.

So, what is meant by policy that defines QoS? The policies
describe the type of storage, the connectivity and the amount
of redundancy required by the application. Given the policy
description the VPD is created or provisioned for that QoS.  In
conjunction with the data path description, a service level
requirement can be set within the policy that defines the
availability objectives (99.9%, 99.99%, etc.). Once a service
level has been added to the policy, Pathline monitors and
reports application-data-path uptime and alerts on exceptions.

Finally, though certainly not of least importance, Pathline
policies allow security requirements to be described. The
ability to define what actions to take upon an application data
path security breach, provides a level of security management
and enforcement currently unavailable from other software
products.

At last, the storage management market, with the Pathline
product, is starting to integrate capabilities to provide
business-relevant management of storage and storage area
networks.

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To contact Anne Skamarock:

Anne Skamarock is an analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com).  She has
worked with networked storage for the last 15 years and is
currently focused on the storage practice within EMA. She
can be reached at mailto:askamarock@enterprisemanagement.com
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RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

InterSAN
http://www.intersan.net/
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