Legato Systems Inc has gathered together a set of supporters to endorse its Celestra technology for open data movement and serverless backups over storage area networks. The Celestra Consortium kicks off with over 30 charter members, including Ancor Systems Inc, Auspex Inc, Compaq Computer Corp, EMC Corp, Gadzoox Inc, McData Corp, Network Appliance Inc and Vixel Communications Inc.
Legato, which initiated the venture but insists that it’s a cooperative effort, says that several of the members will adopt and implement the SCSI Extended Copy specification, based on the SCSI specification for third party copy developed by the Storage Network Industry Association. Legato co-authored both Extended Copy and the Network Data Management Protocol with Network Applicance Inc, and says that gives it the qualifications to start the group off. The Consortium had its first meeting in June, and meets again in December.
Legato itself plans to support the Network Data Management Protocol in its NetWorker storage management applications from the third quarter. That means Legato users will be able to manage any SAN or network attached storage device that includes an NDMP agent. The same NDMP devices will be available to other NDMP- compliant applications and will provide interoperability between file servers and backup systems.
NDMP, developed by Network Appliance and Legato’s recent Intelliguard Software Inc acquisition, is supported by 30 or so vendors. It is claimed to simplify network management by centralizing backup control and reducing network traffic. NDMP, which Legato describes as the TCP/IP for SANs, moves and manages data. Intelliguard’s Celestra program, which Legato claims is the SAN engine, includes a copy command which moves data in a disk and power agent which must be integrated in switches, hubs and other network devices to direct the data mover. NDMP and Celestra are independent of any file system or operating system. The EMC- driven FibreAlliance specification for SANs, which Legato is also backin, is a lower-level protocol connection.
Legato says Celestra can also work with Sun Microsystems Inc’s StoreX Java storage management APIs: StoreX still requires the use of a data mover program plus a data manager application to manage the data mover. Traditional storage networks use SCSI to link disks and tapes to servers. In SANs, disks and tapes and other devices are linked through hubs and switches in Fibre Channel connections.
Legato has been building up its resources in the storage area network management arena with a number of acquisitions over the last year. Last July it bought backup retrieval specialist Software Moguls, and followed that with the acquisition of high availability software vendor FullTime Software Inc in October. Most significant in terms of its SAN strategy, however, was the January 199 purchase of privately held Intelliguard, a specialist in Unix and NT standards-based storage management systems for SANs, in a deal worth about $52m.
