Netreon SANexec Designer Adds Discovery for Full SAN Lifecycle Management

According to Netreon, using SANexec Designer, storage professionals can now control the full lifecycle of a storage area network (SAN) regardless of whether the SAN is brand new or already established. In addition, the company announced an expansion to its list of interoperability rules and supported devices including disk arrays, tape arrays and fabric switches. With SANexec Designer, Storage professionals have full access to and control over information about the storage environment, during each of the planning, validation, optimization and deployment steps of designing, configuring and tuning a SAN.

Using the discovery capabilities of SANexec Designer, storage professionals can capture a snapshot of an established network storage environment, display it graphically and work offline to enhance or expand it. This capability serves both the in-house storage administrator as well as the service provider who is supporting him. They can quickly exchange configuration information and recommendations and speed up the design and optimization of the SAN.

“We have combined design accuracy with the automation of the storage lifecycle management process with SANexec Designer,” said Edward Cooper, Vice President of Marketing for Netreon. “Storage professionals depend on SANexec Designer to document all of the critical steps in order to successfully deploy and manage network storage infrastructures. SANexec Designer is the framework that lets them apply powerful rules enforcement and best practice design methodology to solve real world storage problems.”

SANexec Designer has added support for the latest 2Gb/s switches from McData, the Sphereon 3000 Series Fabric Switches and the 1 Gb/s ES-1000 Edge Switch. With the addition of these latest switches, storage professionals can use SANexec Designer to plan an environment incorporating a switch from either McData or Brocade, the two largest providers of SAN fabric switches.

Netreon continues to add storage solutions so that storage professionals can quickly include more choices from more vendors to meet a broader range of storage challenges. Netreon is also adding or extending its support for several manufacturers interoperability matrices and storage devices:

• Hitachi 9910, 9960, 9970V, 9980V — New to SANexec Designer are the HDS products which have broad distribution from both Hitachi and its partners.
• EMC Symmetrix 8730 and EMC Symmetrix 8830 — Netreon is extending its support of EMC products beyond the Clariion line to include two popular, established Symmetrix solutions.

Netreon says that with these popular systems added to the palette, storage designers will have increased flexibility to design in specific solutions for their environments.

Licensees of Netreon’s SANexec Designer automatically receive the new functionality as part of an Annual Content Subscription (ACS). The ACS enables customers to keep up with the rapidly changing network storage market by delivering new features, new devices, changes to devices, usage scripts and compatibility checks as soon as they are developed.