A third piece of Legato Systems Inc’s SAN storage area network strategy fell into place when the company announced it would support the Network Data Management Protocol in its NetWorker storage management applications from the third quarter. It 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 Inc and Legato’s recent Intelliguard Software Inc acquisition is supported by 30 or so vendors. It is claimed to simplify ease 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 backing 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.
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