Last summer's ratification of the Bluefin specification by the Storage Networking Industry Association set the path for much-needed improvements in storage area network management.

While it likely will take several years for vendors to make their product interfaces compatible with the new standard, SNIA's endorsement is significant, because "Bluefin literally creates the [SAN] integration market," said Roger Reich, chairman of the SNIA committee that adopted Bluefin, and senior technical director for interface standards at Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif.

The Bluefin interface assures that integrators can pick and choose the best hardware and management software without fear of being locked into one solution or leaving customers with a system that can't be updated.

"An integrator can go to six different vendors and get a management appliance of their choice to insert into their SAN," Reich said.The SNIA announced Aug. 12 that it would adopt Bluefin for its Storage Management Initiative, or SMI, a program to develop open storage management interfaces.

Because there have been a number of competing initiatives to create a SAN management standard -- the WideSky initiative spearheaded by EMC Corp., Hopkinton, Mass., for instance -- the SNIA endorsement signaled to SAN product vendors how to direct their product development: Components must speak Bluefin to play in the enterprise-level space.

Over the past few years, Bluefin was developed by some of the biggest players in the field, including BMC Software Inc., Houston; Computer Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y.; Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas; EMC; Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto., Calif.; IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y.; Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto and Veritas.

"That SNIA endorsed Bluefin is a real statement to the industry," said Bill Peldzus, a storage expert with the consulting practice of storage media provider Imation Corp., Oakdale, Minn.

Though fiercely competitive, vendors of storage area networking solutions have long agreed that a common standard is needed to allow their customers to easily discover, manage and monitor devices on a storage network.

Management software that allows organizations to manage multiple components in diverse storage area networks are offered by companies such as Computer Associates, EMC and Veritas. But vendors need a common platform that encompasses a wider range of products. And customers need management platforms that can handle larger and ever-more heterogeneous environments.

That there is no agreed-upon standard interface for devices and software in a SAN to interoperate across produces untold headaches for the integrator trying to build a large-scale SAN, Reich said.

"A switch vendor may have a great tool for supporting its switch," but a system administrator has to worry about the entire network, Peldzus said.

Even a simple SAN can have a large number of different components, such as a server, host bus adapter, switch, storage disk, tape library, tape drive, backup software, application software and database software.

"You multiply these devices by the number of different vendors that are supplying these components, and you end up with management applications that are a mess, that have poor functionality, reliability and security," Reich said.

To get SAN components speaking the same language, the Bluefin initiative uses open Web-based standards now prevalent across both the commercial and government sectors.

Bluefin was built from the Distributed Management Task Force's Web-Based Enterprise Management architecture, which provides the foundation for offering services over the Web. It also draws from the Common Information Model, a schema for allowing management software to interoperate.

"If storage management companies build their software using these standards, [their devices] will be able to communicate with each other's system management platforms," said Bob Iacono, vice president of marketing for Santa Clara, Calif-based Auspex Systems Inc., a manufacturer of SAN-network attached storage gateways.

However, even as SAN companies embrace the SNIA initiative, their own products won't be Bluefin-compliant for a few years.

"The challenge now facing the industry is the broad adoption of Bluefin in shipping products, as well as the refinement and expansion of the specification," Reich said.

It may be some time, however, before integrators will see the fruits from Bluefin. Although a tool for mapping legacy storage devices onto Bluefin-compliant interfaces, called the CIM Object Manager, is freely available online at sourceforge.org and opengroup.org, Bluefin has yet to get to the marketplace.

Indeed, the latest releases of SAN management software have not been built from the Bluefin specification. Instead, companies rely on the time- and resource-consuming task of establishing individual agreements with other vendors to swap application program interfaces, or APIs.

In August, Hewlett-Packard agreed with an API swap with Hitachi Ltd., Toyko. "This API exchange is a short-term solution, which will shortly be followed by our CIM-based products," said Naoya Takahashi, the division president of disk array systems for Hitachi.

Computer Associates has a similar arrangement with many of the vendors it covers with its BrightStor storage management portal. The latest version, released Sept. 23, can manage devices from numerous vendors. The API agreements were made individually through partnerships with product vendors, said Gary McGuire, senior vice president in charge of the product line.

Likewise, the latest version of its storage infrastructure management software offered by Veritas, SANPoint Control, draws APIs from 53 vendor partnerships, said Jonathan Martin, director of product management for Veritas. However, the company is planning to offer CIM and Bluefin-enabled products within the next year.

"A lot of these standards are still working themselves out. We are continuing to watch them. As they solidify and come to market, we'll incorporate them into Veritas technology," Martin said.

All of which means it may take several years for Bluefin to work itself into the marketplace.

"In the long term, it will be extremely practical. But in the near term, Bluefin is not really practical yet," Iacono said. Solutions that exist today only allow limited connectivity with only very crude monitoring capabilities. "I'm going to take a wait-and-see stance. It's still being mapped out. Bluefin is still in the PowerPoint stages." Peldzus said.