ARTICLE POSTED May 5th, 2003 Vendor profile: Innovative InterSAN excels in automation By Barb Goldworm Barb Goldworm Large enterprises face a critical storage challenge today — managing the explosive growth of data while controlling costs and meeting service-level agreements (SLA). While SANs offer many benefits to help address this data growth, multi-vendor networked storage environments introduce diverse technologies and complexities that make manual configuration, provisioning and management extremely time-consuming and cumbersome — and thus inefficient and expensive. InterSAN offers storage-area management (SAM) software that automates the management of storage resources and operations, allowing IT departments to consistently deliver storage services that meet their SLA commitments. InterSAN at a Glance Offerings: Storage-area management (SAM) automation and provisioning software Management: Chris Melville, Co-founder, President, CEO and Chairman; Christina Mercier, Co-founder, VP and CTO; Karen Dutch, VP of Marketing Revenue and customer base: Privately held. Does not release revenue or customer base information. Number of employees: 60-plus, headquartered in Scotts Valley, CA History: Founded January 2000. Raised over $28M in venture funding. History and overview InterSAN was founded in January 2000 with the mission of solving multi-vendor storage management problems for enterprise customers. InterSAN is privately held, having completed several rounds of financing from Alliance Ventures, Kumar Malavalli (advisor to Greg Reyes, chairman and CEO of Brocade), Morgan Keegan & Company, SoundView Ventures and, most recently, Worldview Technology Partners and Fidelity Ventures. Focusing on advanced automation, InterSAN's flagship product, Pathline, provides end-to-end path management from the application to its storage resources. It also automates error-prone day-to-day storage provisioning and management processes. In December 2001, InterSAN was the first vendor to ship commercial software that delivered automated provisioning. It was also the first to ship software that looked at the application impact of storage degradation and failures, and it included application-to-data path as part of the discovery process. Describing the initial product release in January 2002, market researcher Enterprise Storage Group said, "InterSAN is breaking ground with their Pathline solution, offering the first real policy-based storage network management application on the market. This is where Enterprise Storage Management needs to go." Pathline was also honored with Network Magazine's storage management 2002 Product of the Year award, and InterSAN has been included on Byte and Switch's list of Top 10 Privately Held Companies for over a year. Now, with its latest 2.5 release in March 2003, InterSAN is again raising the bar in provisioning and automation. A new policy compliance audit included in Pathline 2.5 looks at existing paths and audits against policies. These audits will find incomplete paths (often from mistakes made during manual configuration), as well as non-compliant paths. Using this audit feature, one customer found 1.5 TB of orphaned storage (storage that had no hosts able to access it). Also new in Version 2.5 is the ability to do automated path reconfiguration. When changes are made due to things like consolidation, 1GB-to-2GB upgrades, changes to HBAs and changes to WorldWide Names (WWN), additional changes are required. For example, this could include zoning to the new WWNs. In one step, after the hardware is ready, Pathline can remap the paths and automate the LUN mapping and zoning changes. (Later it can delete the old configuration information.) Chargeback reports are also new in 2.5, providing storage consumption billing information by customer, application or line of business. While Version 2.5 is still in the early stages of customer implementations, initial customer feedback is good. According to one user, "InterSAN has been very responsive. They listened to our requirements and worked with us to understand the problems we were trying to solve. They exceeded our expectations by bringing a larger breadth of function than we initially required." On InterSAN vs. the competition, this user declared, "We had a good understanding of the issues before we started, and we have to manage hundreds of provisioning requests a month while maintaining five-nines availability. We evaluated a long list of vendors, and InterSAN had better depth and breadth of functionality in several key areas." Current assessment InterSAN is still a young company running on venture capital and some great ideas. While it is still working on its first group of customers (only one was willing to talk), the company has developed a product that provides greater depth and breadth of functionality in automated provisioning than both its fellow startup competitors and the industry leaders. With a strong product out of the chute, and a strong follow-up release in March, the company continues to deliver innovation. As the economy improves and customers can again spend money on IT, Pathline should be evaluated by any large enterprise looking for ways to improve its storage operations. Market area, competition and marketing approach InterSAN's Pathline product is a unified management approach to multi-vendor, policy-based automation and management for the Global 2000 enterprise environment. InterSAN also provides professional services both directly and through its relationship with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), using Pathline as a tool to help with those services. Key competitors include: Veritas, Tivoli, CA, HP, BMC (no longer selling its Patrol Storage Manager product), EMC and a number of other start-up companies including Invio, CreekPath, AppIQ and TrueSAN. Value proposition InterSAN's value proposition calls for the delivery of storage services excellence by enabling enterprise customers to better manage growth and provide quality services in an affordable, manageable and secure environment. Partnership strategy and key relationships InterSAN sells directly and has a strong worldwide reseller partnership with HDS. It has technology partnerships with the major storage hardware vendors, including Brocade, Cisco (will have MDS support Q2), EMC, Emulex, IBM, Inrange (in the process of being acquired by CNT), JNI, LSI Logic, McDATA and QLogic. It also announced a relationship with Rhapsody, now part of Brocade, to support its fabric application services platform. Pricing strategies Pricing is based on terabytes under management, along with a one-time charge for each vendor agent. Technology vision and future direction Pathline is an advanced policy-based SAM automation software solution, designed to centralize and automate the provisioning and management of storage services. Pathline allows the automation of time-consuming, error-prone day-to-day storage operations, including storage provisioning, host file system capacity utilization monitoring, health monitoring, inventory management and even service-level tracking by application. Pathline also provides capacity planning and forecasting information, and it can be used to generate charge-back reports. Policy-based management features include the creation, auditing and enforcement of policies that codify best practices and procedures. Application/business views monitor the storage infrastructure from the perspective of the application, line of business, location or storage domain. This includes the application impact of storage resource outages. Pathline takes a policy-based management approach to automated provisioning. For example, the product can use policies to find potential candidate paths, select the optimal fit, allow path proofing by a human (who can override if needed) and automate the configuration of all related devices (allowing multiple paths for failover), including LUN mapping and fabric zoning. Path management covers the application through the fabric to the storage devices, using InterSAN's patented Virtual Private DataPath (VPD). Future plans include policy-based management for additional storage services such as replication and virtualization by early 2004. Also in 2004, InterSAN plans to further leverage Pathline's path knowledge by implementing self-healing paths that route around problems. Current limitations The only technical issue raised by the InterSAN user interviewed by SNW Online involved implementation. According to the user, implementation required unique component names for each path, which called for the development of a new naming standard (which took three weeks). Once this was done, there were no other issues or limitations. While the product is still relatively new, it is deep in its functionality. If anything, it may be ahead of the market, though this may be attributable to the down economy. InterSAN's size is a potential issue in the minds of prospective customers who may feel more comfortable with larger, more established vendors. This issue has been helped by the company's relatively new HDS relationship, which was announced in October 2002. The customer base is still small, in part due to InterSAN's size, in part due to the economy, and in part due to the time required for a large enterprise implementation of an automation product. Overall, with an advanced and innovative product, InterSAN is a strong choice for anyone looking to realize the many benefits of automation in storage provisioning and storage services management. As budget constraints loosen, Pathline should definitely be on many short lists. About the author Barb Goldworm is an independent analyst and consultant with over 20 years experience in the computer industry in systems and storage management, in various technical, marketing, industry analyst and senior management positions with IBM, StorageTek, Novell, Enterprise Management Associates and other successful startup ventures. She has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences worldwide for over 10 years, and was the creator and track chair for the Networld+Interop track on Networked Storage. She has been a regular columnist and contributor for various trade publications, as well as being frequently quoted in the press. As a member of the Council of Communications Advisors (an international association of thought leaders providing consulting to the institutional investment community) she advises investment clients on business issues and trends occurring within the communications and technology industries. Barb is also an instructor of storage networking classes through HGAI (http://www.hgai.com/). She can be reached at barbgoldworm@earthlink.net. Feedback: feedback@snwonline.com Questions: questions@snwonline.com Technical difficulties: webmaster@snwonline.com