Fibre Channel Primer

11 Chapter 2: Fibre Channel at Work
MANAGEMENT
Many companies are returning to the concept of centralized
management of data storage, even within distributed IT architectures.
The Gartner Group forecasts that over 70 percent of shared storage
in networked environments will be centralized by the year 2000.
Storage must be viewed as a system, delivering services and
protecting data assets. Proper management of this system provides
highly available data access, improved performance, complete data
security, and storage growth at a reasonable cost. A storage system is
comprised of on-line storage, near-line storage, archived storage, and
backup storage. Storage management software moves data among
these elements as required to meet the enterprise’s storage
management strategy. Fibre Channel removes barriers associated with
the implementation of this strategy.
Fibre Channel devices use SNMP and SCSI Enclosure Services
(SES) for systems management from a central location. The Fibre
Channel standard supports SNMP over IP or directly over Fibre
Channel natively. Fibre Channel manufacturers normally provide a
point solution for SNMP that can be integrated into an enterprise
management system. Fibre Channel is designed to be self-managing
with most management activity focused on determining status. New
WEB-based management systems are also available for system
management.
SES is similar to SNMP but is designed to obtain information
from storage devices that do not implement IP or SNMP. A server
will act as a proxy agent for a storage system.
Centralized storage simplifies management. Fibre Channel
provides the ability to view storage as if it were centralized, even if it
is physically distributed around the enterprise. Fibre Channel supports
critical business applications with performance, reliability, fast data
access and transfer, and managed storage and server networks.