Doubles IT Productivity Compared to SANsurfer and Host Connectivity Manager
According to a survey of 149 Fortune 1000 storage administrators, the top inhibitor of implementing new initiatives is staffing. Additionally, one of the top pain points is managing storage. There are three ways to fix staffing problems:
- Hire more people
- Do less
- Make the people you have more productive.
Given today’s economy, hiring more people is not a likely scenario. Reducing IT’s workload in today’s 24×7 world is laughable. However, increasing productivity certainly is possible and has become a focus for IT organizations everywhere.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) have become essential for increasing organizational productivity. SANs simplify backup and are essential for virtual server deployments to facilitate virtual machine (VM) migration. But did you know that the choice of Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) can impact your company’s productivity?
Emulex is very proud of OneCommand™ Manager, our adapter management application. We know that we have the best solution for installing, configuring, managing and troubleshooting Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and network interface card (NIC) ports. But we never really proved it.
Our marketing team sent us off to do just that. Our mission was to compare OneCommand Manager to QLogic’s SANsurfer and Brocade’s Host Connectivity Manager(HCM). We took an approach where we looked at two aspects, how long it takes to do standard tasks and basic functionality.
Click here to see the results.
We performed these activities, timed them and then analyzed the productivity savings for a deployment of 175 ports. We looked at installation, parameter updates, firmware updates and driver updates. We assumed that you might refresh twice a year. Note that we chose 175 ports because in a similar survey, that is the number of ports found in a small- to medium,sized enterprise, according to TheInfoPro. Similarly, we made a list of the features in OneCommand Manager and compared the feature set found in SANsurfer and HCM.
Our findings were:
- For HBA management, OneCommand Manager cut the time requrired to manage ports in half.
- For CNA management, OneCommand manager cut management time by around a third.
- In terms of functionality, OneCommand Manage has twice the functionality of HCM and SANsurfer.
Our marketing team took this information and put it in a report card format, similar to the ones your kids have just brought home from school. What is interesting is that the PDF also features links to video captures of the actual runs we did of the three management applications.
Click here to see the results.
We at Emulex Labs invite you to download the report cards and study the results. By using OneCommand Manager, you will have more time to spend hanging out at the pool this summer!
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