Onaro delivers SAN manager

Onaro on Monday will roll out what company officials are billing as the industry’s first predictive change management technology for SANs (storage area networks), designed to help storage administrators increase their effectiveness.

Called SANscreen, the product can help administrators figure out the sometimes-complex web of access paths and their relationships and interdependence with a SAN, according to company officials.

The new product supplies the SAN infrastructure that supports utility computing, which company officials believe is on its way to becoming a requirement for IT shops that aspire to be a service organization. SANscreen also puts in place real-time network assurance for key storage processes besides SANs such as recovery and backup, they said.

“If they didn’t have SANscreen to automate and accelerate the change process, we think an entire enterprise can be at risk of down times, brownouts, and security breaches. With it [SANscreen], we think storage administrators can now employ a SAN more for what they originally intended, which is an economy of scale play for centrally managed storage as well as a foundation for storage services,” said Shai Scharf, Onaro’s CEO and co-founder.

Frank Moss, the co-founder of Tivoli Systems and Bowstreet, who is serving as the chief advisor to Onaro, thinks the new technology addresses a major “pain point” in the technical lives of administrators, namely solid command over managing a complex SAN environment. He believes SANscreen can play a role in helping users transition to a utility computing model.

“I think the ability to predict where problems might occur is the wave of the future. It strikes me as perhaps the early appearance of what might be the next big systems management market — utility computing management,” Moss said.

Some early testers of the product appear to like what they see so far in terms of its reliability.

“Our primary concerns in changing and growing SANs have to do with stability and availability because our central business focus is on end-user service levels and the cost of support. These things are too varied and complex to achieve through manual means like spreadsheets. We needed an automated process that monitors the state of the SAN and can anticipate problems before they happen,” said Robert Shinn, a principal at State Street Global Advisors.

Explaining how the product works, company officials said it employs analysis simulation capabilities to predict the impact of changes before they occur. It also uses root-cause analysis to both detect and advise how to fix errors before, during, and after SAN changes.

Listing other advantages of the new technology, Scharf and other Onaro executives said SANscreen also can double the amount of storage each administrator has to work with through improved operational efficiencies. It also offers an audit history and security for regulatory compliance, and enables Six Sigma and ITIL best practices.

Available this week SANscreen is priced on the complexity of the SAN environment with configurations averaging between $100 and $125 per switch port, company officials said.