By Jo Maitland
Veritas Software Corp unveiled a storage management initiative Thursday, joining the shopping list of vendors in this space that are attempting to open up the SAN market while pushing their own technologies as the de facto standard. The company also announced it will open an integration lab in the next few weeks for its partners to develop topology, security and quality-of-service interoperability between products.
The Veritas V3 SAN venture includes three storage virtualization technologies that it claims will provide server applications and storage management software with a logical view of the storage resources on a SAN. This will allow administrators to scale installations and ensure availability, said Robin Purolit, director of SANs at Veritas. The company plans to offer this technology to its OEM partners which totaled 35 when Veritas announced its third-quarter numbers last month. (CI No 3,770).
Veritas has also submitted the APIs to the storage networking industry association, SNIA, for industry approval. Purolit assured these APIs will talk to all interfaces whether they are standardized or proprietary, which includes EMC Corp and its partners at the Fibre Alliance. He said that to realize the vision of a true storage area network, the technology being implemented into the datacenter has to be extremely robust which means being able to dynamically manage and adjust each device on the SAN. The V3 initiative creates three steps to addresses this, Purolit said.
The V stands for virtualizing networked storage resources, by centralizing and automating storage management. According to Veritas, this will enable a range of tasks to be performed without downtime. For example, new storage can be added to keep up with capacity demands, or storage configurations can be changed to optimize performance or improve availability levels. Storage virtualization is a concept that has been used successfully for years in mainframe systems to dynamically lower costs of management in centralized data centers, said Michael Peterson, president and senior analyst at Strategic Research. Veritas is extending this concept to open systems SANs, allowing increased heterogeneity.
The first element of Veritas’ initiative, the V3 SAN Access Layer, is a new host-based technology that sits between SAN devices and storage management applications. This layer communicates with SAN hardware using existing and emerging standards and APIs as well as vendor-specific methods, the company said. It is an API that can talk to all the devices on the SAN and capture and collect information from them on how they are performing. This layer will be imbedded into the Veritas cluster server over the next nine months to enable automatic configuration of devices. Currently, this process is not automated.
The second technology is the V3 Storage Appliance, a software suite based on Veritas Volume Manager and File System that allows hardware OEMs and integrators to embed virtualization services into SAN hardware. It includes a new virtual disk built on top of volume manager that can dynamically map storage into virtual disks and tune storage device configurations on the fly. For example, if a company web server gets a 1,000 hits a day and then launches an e-commerce app and get 10,000 hits a day, storage space can be freed up to support this. It introduces a quality- of-service model to storage, said Purolit. The final piece of the puzzle is a set of management tools or agents that provide an interface to the software or, code that bridges between the GUI and the applications, said Purolit.
Brocade Communications Systems and Gain Systems are the only two companies to have publicly announced support for V3 so far. The V3 Access Layer will be available for both Unix and Windows NT and will be bundled with future releases of products from Veritas and its partners. The company did not announce any release dates or pricing.
