Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

CA READIES iSponsors FOR STORAGE MANAGEMENT ASSAULT
By Simon Robinson, the451.com

Computer Associates says it has amassed more than two hundred 'iSponsors,' or storage integration modules, in preparation for the general availability of its automated storage management play, BrightStor Portal. The software giant has spent the last three months working with partners and other storage players to develop the modules so that BrightStor Portal will be able to manage and control non-CA hardware and software storage components ­ a play that appears remarkably similar to EMC's WideSky initiative that is part of its AutoIS storage management strategy.

BrightStor Portal ­ first announced at CA World in April this year ­ is scheduled to be generally available within the next two months. CA says it is working with around 50 beta customers in North America and Europe, mainly in the financial and government sectors, although it's not yet revealing their identity.

Impact assessment

The message CA is amassing a large number of iSponsor software modules that will allow its forthcoming BrightStor Portal to integrate with a customer's wider storage infrastructure. Competitive landscape Although CA is pitching against its traditional competitors such as Veritas, Legato, BMC, IBM and HP, the development of iSponsors could also rock CA's long-standing relationship with EMC, since they play a similar role to EMC's WideSky middleware initiative. The451 assessment BrightStor Portal is CA's chance to avenge past failures, and as such can be considered one of its most important product releases for some time ­ perhaps its most important in the storage space. CA's chief rival, Veritas, continues to dither over its strategy on centralized storage management, and CA believes it has the most complete offering in the market. It also claims iSponsors offer a quick, easy and standard way for third-party products to integrate with its portal, but it remains to be seen whether the industry is ready to swallow another "proprietary" integration standard.

Context With its wide range of data availability, media management, SAN management and storage resource management (SRM) software now consolidated under the BrightStor brand and business unit, CA is looking to steal the initiative from incumbents like Veritas in centralized storage management.

Indeed, CA says it is already making strides in this respect, partly due to its "flexible" subscription-based business model, but also because the BrightStor brand is gaining traction in the market. The company turned in a respectable set of Q1 results this week, although it doesn't break out revenues by business unit. The majority of storage revenue growth is coming from its data protection products, CA says, but its SRM products are growing the fastest.

Products Underpinned by a layer of 'Common Services,' which provide event management, instrumentation technology and business process (workflow) views, CA's next phase of development is to build an additional layer of automation services on top of its existing storage products that offer a centralized and flexible way to manage heterogeneous storage environments.

CA says BrightStor Portal is unique among storage vendors because it can combine its storage management expertise with other CA technologies. This not only pertains to its CleverPath portal and eTrust security technologies, but also its Neugents predictive modeling expertise and elements of the Unicenter systems management tools.

Technology However, for BrightStor Portal to be capable of managing multivendor environments, it clearly needs to integrate with third-party components. CA's answer to this is iSponsors, or small software modules that are written for each third-party software application or hardware device in the storage network. CA says iSponsors are essentially a way of logically describing the role of an application or device that can be built around existing APIs.

CA remains ambivalent about who actually builds the iSponsors. It is encouraging third-party storage vendors to build them, but has been developing them in-house for competitive products, such as backup products from Veritas and Legato. So far, CA says it has built up a library of over 200 iSponsors ­ covering products from the main hardware array, switch and backup vendors ­ and is currently developing them on an "as needed" basis for BrightStor Portal beta customers. CA is also considering building iSponsors for applications further up the stack, such as Oracle databases and Exchange.

The ultimate aim for BrightStor Portal is to establish it as a dynamic provisioning platform, where administrators can determine rules that allow applications to automatically allocate themselves more storage if they are approaching their threshold. CA says it can configure the portal to do this today, but aims to include this functionality out of the box within the next year. While the technology exists to achieve this today, CA still has to figure out a foolproof way to 'productize' this. Developers are focusing on CA's Neugents predictive modeling technology to achieve this.

Virtualization

However, CA continues to lag in its virtualization strategy. While it inherited some virtualization technologies via its acquisition of Sterling Commerce, CA initially said it wasn't interested in providing the actual virtualization layer itself, instead claiming it preferred to focus on the management layer and work with incumbent vendors. This is partly because it sees low adoption rates of virtualization tools because of the inability of current tools to virtualize "across the enterprise." But CA now says it does see a market opportunity in virtualization, although it doesn't yet appear to have identified exactly what form this will take. If CA is serious about taking a stake in the dynamic provisioning market, we would view providing a virtualization layer as a significant portion of this.

Competition

With backup giant Veritas taking ages to formalize its centralized storage management strategy, CA potentially has the broad functionality in BrightStor Portal to make amends for its past failures to establish itself as an early force in this nascent market. That the competitive landscape is extremely busy only emphasizes the size of the opportunity that CA could tap into, although it will encounter plenty of competition from a batch of well- funded startups, such as InterSAN, Invio and Fujitsu Softek, as well as its traditional foes in the systems management space. CA's differentiation here is that as well as supporting major storage protocols, such as fiber channel and iSCSI, it also supports all storage topologies, including direct attached and NAS, as well as SAN. Most of the startups are focusing their efforts initially on the SAN.

An interesting fallout from CA's iSponsors initiative could be the effect on its relationship with EMC. The two have been close allies for a number of years ­ indeed, EMC chief executive Joe Tucci presented at CA World in 2001 ­ but CA admits there is significant overlap between iSponsors and WideSky as a middleware layer for heterogeneous and automated storage management. CA argues that, using iSponsors, BrightStor Portal can plug into any storage environment, where EMC's WideSky is designed to improve the performance of EMC's own hardware.

If nothing else, the emergence of iSponsors and WideSky merely serves to illustrate the absence of standardization in the storage industry. Ultimately, the proliferation of de facto standards threatens to make de jure standards efforts, such as CIM/WBEM and the more recent Bluefin, obsolete before they are released, even though all vendors ­ CA included ­ continue to pay lip service to the importance of official standards.

Courtesy of the451.com