The Real Story about Open Systems Storage Management

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February 2007. In an effort to simplify their IT environments and reduce costs, customers are looking for a source of storage management that both is open and versatile, and that supports a broad range of mixed components. HP is delivering products today that fill this need for simplified, open storage resource management for use in heterogeneous environments.

Consider the following facts:

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Fact 1: Infostor and the Association of Storage Networking Professionals have named HP Storage Essentials as the preferred choice for Storage Management Software.[1]

Even though EMC, IBM, Symantec, CA, and many other vendors offer storage management tools -- for the past two years running, HP’s Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition has been selected as the Most Valuable Product in the Storage Management Software category by the members of Association of Storage Network Professionals.

This award represents a powerful endorsement of HP Storage Essentials by knowledgeable storage management professionals.

Fact 2: “HP Storage Essentials” won the Network World Clear Choice Award for storage resource management (SRM).[2]

The 2006 Clear Choice Award for SRM recognized the leading product in this category based on Network World criteria. This test required products to auto-discover a SAN comprising nine HBAs from QLogic and Emulex, two QLogic Fibre Channel switches, Nexsan SATABlade and SATABeast storage arrays, Windows 2000 and 2003 servers, and Red Hat ES 3.0 and 4.0 and SUSE Linux 10 servers. The IP network had three segments in a simulated WAN configuration and two SAN segments using LUN masking – and HP Storage Essentials garnered the top rating.

Fact 3: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has certified HP Storage Essentials to manage all critical SAN components, array, fabric and switch management.[3]

Effective storage management requires the ability to discover all elements of a storage environment -- arrays, fabric, switches, host bus adapters (HBAs) -- and manage them effectively. The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) tests products to ensure they meet its standards in a number of key areas. SNIA has certified HP Storage Essentials v5.1 as meeting its standards in the discovery of arrays, fabric, switches, and HBAs, and as meeting its standards in the management of arrays, fabric, and switches.³

Standards compliance helps to streamline deployment of a resource solution and simplifies the insertion of new storage resources into the storage resource pool. HP’s end-to-end SNIA compliance delivers greater predictability and improves interoperability for heterogeneous SANs. Contrast this to IBM’s more limited certification (Fact 4, below).

Fact 4: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has certified IBM APERI and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center to the array management test cases only.[4]

By comparison, HP has passed the tests not only for arrays, but also for fabric, and for switches (Fact 3), giving HP StorageWorks solutions a distinct advantage in standards compliance, openness and completeness versus IBM.

Step 5: The openness and value of HP’s solutions are recognized by other industry manufacturers of enterprise storage systems.[5]

HP StorageAuthority® storage resource management (SRM) and SAN management software (the middleware technology in HP Storage Essentials) is used by leading makers of enterprise storage systems (Bull, Engenio/LSI, HDS, Sun and SGI) as a base from which they offer robust management solutions to their customers. HP’s strategic joint development and OEM alliances with these partners ensure that HP SRM technology will provide even greater management capabilities in the future. These relationships provide customers with a broad range of distribution, service, and support options, and unequalled multi-vendor storage and server infrastructure solutions.

To learn more about HP StorageAuthority OEM Alliances see: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/appiq/

Bottom line

Customers can gain clear benefits through HP’s industry leadership in open systems storage management. For full SMI-S compliance, openness, and more, we believe that HP StorageWorks Storage Essentials is the clear choice.

To learn more about HP Storage Software see: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/software/index.html

¹ June 20, 2006. See http://www.infostor.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=258171&p=23

² December 4, 2006. See http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2006/120406-storage-resource-management-test.html

³ SNIA Conformance Testing see http://www.snia.org/ctp/smi_conform/smi_client_hp

⁴ SNIA Conformance Testing see http://www.snia.org/ctp/smi_conform/smi_client_ibm

⁵ HP StorageWorks: HP StorageAuthority OEM Alliances, http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/appiq/index.html

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