Candera overcomes obstacles still facing EMC, HP Candera, the latest entrant in the storage management race, says it has developed an unnamed device that manages heterogeneous storage management, something storage giants EMC and Hewlett-Packard still lack.According to Sundi Sundaresh, president and CEO of Candera, the forthcoming device from the Milpitas, Calif.-based startup can provision and create automated policies from a single point of management. These capabilities are not available from host-based software. The device will be an enterprise-grade network controller built upon Candera’s UStar architecture, Sundaresh explained.“There is no need to rip out legacy equipment,” Sundaresh said. “It fits within an existing storage area network.” Sundaresh said the device is not a switch as are the ones being developed by Brocade Communications Systems and Cisco Systems, which also claim support for heterogeneous SANs. In describing the device, Sundaresh said it features specialized hardware and software, including custom-built ASICs.Like Brocade, Candera must compete with existing host-based storage management products available from EMC, Veritas, and HP. “Today enterprises run either a homogonous SAN, which nobody does, or they used host-based software,” explained Mark Davis, senior vice president of marketing at Candera. “EMC’s host-based software is good for EMC, but has limited capabilities for non-EMC systems.”The same holds true for other storage vendors developing storage management software. HP continues to update its HP OpenView Storage Area Manager, a host-based platform, said Rob Emsley, manager of product marketing at HP’s network storage solutions division. Emsley said HP is working to integrate its storage provisioning software into the OpenView platform, which currently supports five distinct management modules.