Discovery agent deployment in diverse SAN environments

Storage area networks (SANs) are networks that provide storage and related services to servers. SAN´s often serve very diverse environments with respect to the operating systems of the attached servers. This diversity increases the complexity of SAN management, and often mandates that specialized software tools be used to ensure optimal SAN performance. All SAN management solutions currently on the market require some type of agent software running on the servers attached to the SAN to discover various types of information. Thus the deployment of the discovery agent is a critical part of the success of any SAN management software solution. This paper describes a software tool that we developed for remote deployment of SAN discovery agents in multiple operating system environments. The tool supports selective and parallel agent deployment, update, and removal of the agent. The performance of the tool is evaluated in the hp OpenView storage area manager 3.1 SAN management software. The results indicate that the tool allows for better flexibility through a finer granularity of control during the agent deployment process and provides a substantial performance improvement.