StorageKilter Blog

Looking out a single porthole

October 3rd, 2009

Looking out the porthole of a cruise ship’s cabin only gives you a limited view of what’s going on, no matter how much money you have spent on the trip. Want to see what’s happening on the other side of the ship?  Move to another porthole.

Managing storage has always had one thing in common with a cruise ship travel– and it sure isn’t the food.  Admins have had to use different management consoles to run different aspects of their storage, a situation that emphasizes the status of many products as stand-alone applications that don’t necessarily play well together (even when those products come from the same company).  Managing CDP, archiving, and remote replication typically means hopping between management interfaces as you move from tool to tool. But times are changing, and for the better.

CommVault has integrated a number of tools within a common interface, and yesterday (10/01/09) EMC announced that its new RecoverPoint 3.2 release (that’s the rebranded product they got from the Kasha acquisition 3-1/2 years ago) as a common management interface for all of RecoverPoint’s functionality, including CDP and local and remote replication.

Merging the management of all data protection products within a single console is surely a worthwhile goal, particularly if the products within that console truly interoperate with one another. Lacking industry standards for management interfaces and middleware, it’s likely such management screens will be proprietary for the most part. Still, companies like EMC which have a robust set of in-house management products and an equally robust ecosystem of third party products, are well-advised to keep their APIs open to make their management consoles even more useful in the future

Entry Filed under: Storage strategies