Storage managers with diverse hardware environments have a new administration option, BrightStor SAN Manager, released by Computer Associates International Inc. on Tuesday.
The products interface is geared for mid-level staff. “It doesnt have to be your senior-level SAN experts doing this. In major corporations, theres usually one or two people who are senior… thats not really efficient,” said Eric Pitcher, vice president of storage brand management, in Islandia, N.Y.
BrightStor SAN Manager can run as a stand-alone product with its own client interface, or through CAs BrightStor Portal application. It connects to the portal and to other CA software with hooks called Common Services, Pitcher said.
Available now, BrightStor SAN Manager supports all major arrays, switches, host-bus adapters and tape libraries. Only arrays from LSI Logic Corp. and switches from Cisco Systems Inc. are absent from CAs partner list; those will be supported by the next major version, officials said. The switches might be supported sooner, they added.
Unsupported hardware can still be discovered, but wont have full reporting and firmware details, Pitcher said.
The software also includes native support for the evolving CIM interoperability protocol and its Bluefin implementation specification, plus the ability to build custom views. Pricing per server starts at $1,095 for Windows and $1,495 for Unix. The next version, 2.0, is due by years end and adds high availability and clustering, he said.
“Theyve got some interesting features in it,” said industry analyst Dennis Martin, of Evaluator Group Inc. Business process views stand out, where a user could manage storage hardware by a function like payroll or human resources, he noted. But a weakness is that many CA competitors are on second- and third-generation products already, he added, in Greenwood Village, Colo.