iSAN: Storage area network management modeling simulation

Abstract

Storage Management plays an important role in ensuring the service level agreements (availability, reliability, performance etc..) that are critical to the operation of resilient business IT infrastructure. Also, Storage Resource Management (SRM) is becoming the largest component in the overall cost of ownership of any large enterprise IT environment. Considering these functional requirements and business opportunities, several SRM suites have cropped up in the market place to provide uniform and interoperable management. But, development and test of these suites require access to huge set of heterogeneous multivendor Storage Area Network (SAN) devices like Fiber Channel Switches, Storage Subsystems, Tape Libraries, Servers etc... It's almost impractical for a SRM Suite software manufacturer to own and manage these huge varieties of devices. Management modules of SAN devices have become logically independent components with the emergence of CIM and SMI-S. In this paper, we propose a framework and implementation named iSAN (imitation Storage Area Network) that models the management module of the devices. Our tool can be used to perform a) simulation of management module ranging from individual device to large scale multi-vendor heterogeneous SAN for enterprise b) what-if-analysis of enterprise IT environment before modeling the changes. This tool provides efficiency and cost-effectiveness with respect to development, test of SRM suites and planning of IT environment by removing their dependence on high cost SAN hardware. We have implemented this tool iSAN, and our experiment results show that one can attain the above mentioned functional objectives and bring significant productivity to enterprise IT environment management. © 2007 IEEE.