AppIQ Storage Authority 4.0 bridges storage and business

Excitement and anticipation mount before any review, but those feelings were far more intense when it came time to evaluate SA (Storage Authority) Suite 4.0, AppIQ’s flagship storage management software. After all, the suite so enticed several major vendors — including Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, SGI, and Sun Microsystems — that they made it part of their storage portfolios, a recognition no other product in that area has received.

Testing SA proved to me that it’s earned that distinction. Taken one by one, SA’s features seem on par with those of competing products, but digging deeper reveals a combination of strong points that no other product I’ve seen so far can match.

AppIQ released SA Suite 4.0 at the end of August. Among other improvements, the release extends the range of supported hardware to NetApp filers and to IBM’s TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers. Other additions of note include an analysis and reporting system for Veritas NetBackup backup jobs and improved storage awareness for Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Top-notch GUI

For my review I had access to a Windows 2000 machine running SA Suite 4.0 and to a rather large heterogeneous SAN with FC (Fibre Channel) gear and servers from just about every vendor. Tapping the SA Java GUI from a browser, I began my evaluation by launching a discovery of the devices and applications in my test SAN. Discovery took only a few minutes, after which SA opened the topology view, an easy-to-navigate reticular map of everything on the storage network, including storage arrays, switches, servers, and applications. On the left pane, the same information was replicated in tree format.

The topology map changes according to the device or application you select, and it reveals other devices connected to the same network path. Double-click any node in your SAN, and the GUI will open another window with buttons and tabs that provide access to additional details for that unit.

Immensely useful is the fact that SA gives insight into each device’s dependencies. This information allows you to quickly determine the applications, clients, or NAS hosts that rely on a single storage unit and thus could be adversely affected by a fault or by maintenance. No other management tool I know makes it easier to understand what storage-device failure can bring down an application.

The GUI’s context menus also offer powerful functionality, including the ability to launch a device’s native management application. For example, from the context menu of a NetApp filer, I was able to bring up its management app, FilerView, straight from the SA GUI.

Similarly, I was able to Telnet to a Brocade switch and access its CLI. You probably won’t use SA’s easy access to native apps very often. Still, it’s reassuring to know that you can in the event that a local software update makes a device temporarily incompatible.

Among the best aspects of SA is the fact that it creates hyperlinks in the topology view for each device and application on your SAN. These hyperlinks make it possible to zoom with just a few mouse clicks from a summary view into the minute details of a single FC port on any device.

To help navigate a large SAN, SA offers features such as the ability to easily drag and drop changes to the topology layout; fast panning; filtering based on a variety of criteria; and the ability to isolate a specific domain in a separate window.

SA is also forgiving and can quickly recover from a messed-up layout by bringing back its original state. In addition, security tracking keeps an accurate journal of any user access or configuration change, a capability auditors will appreciate.

SA does not offer only static data on ports and connections. With just a mouse click, you can overlay numerical information such as capacity and performance charts to the layout. Reading is easy, thanks in part to a legend, which can be hidden when no longer needed.

Interestingly, you can take different views of numeric charts. For example, you can focus on the total capacity of your SAN, or you can group by storage device, host, or switch, which simplifies spotting imbalances in performance or allocation.

SA’s various views make managing a large SAN easy — even fun. Moreover, you can grant access to various features based on roles, thereby simplifying user training by focusing attention only on what is needed. You can also set up offline delivery of selected data to specific users, such as a monthly charge-back report in HTML, XML, PDF, or Excel format sent by e-mail to each department manager.

Visionary provisioning

Those are all great features, but provisioning storage is what got me hooked on SA. All the provision tasks — including creating volumes, defining LUNs (logical unit numbers), and assigning zones — are grouped in a single window, a sharp contrast to the multiple UIs that native tools offer.

SA provisioning tools allow for great flexibility: You can build separate jobs for each activity — creating a volume, adjusting the LUN security, modifying the zoning — or you can incorporate each step into a comprehensive script.

No less important, the wizard automatically narrowed down the remaining options as I worked out each step, which can reduce the possibility of trivial errors when working on a large, unfamiliar network.

There are a couple aspects of SA that I would change, however. For example, I would like for its authentication system to be capable of integrating with an existing directory instead of making admins create local users and groups, which complicates management and duplicates some administrative tasks.

I would also like AppIQ to simplify the installation of server agents, which currently is a manual process. AppIQ has told me, however, that future versions will use an LDAP directory and that agents are needed only for Linux/Unix servers because Windows machines can be queried via WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), which makes an agent unnecessary for that OS.

SA Suite 4.0 includes a comprehensive asset management system that can track a wealth of financial data, including depreciation and historical performance statistics. This information can be very helpful for a variety of business tasks, such as determining charge-back costs, setting proper insurance coverage, or quickly assessing the residual value of an item before replacing it.

From what I saw during my evaluation, AppIQ Storage Authority Suite 4.0 has powerful features that can make managing your SAN easier and less expensive, while filling the knowledge gap between your applications and storage network. Perhaps more important, SA can make your storage network easier to understand, not only for your storage admins but also for your users.