Fidelity Investments will roll out a packaged storage
area network (San) management tool that will replace an in-house
application used to automatically provision storage space and
charge business units for using the capacity.
For the past three months, Fidelity has been working to install
InterSAN's Pathline 2.5 software at multiple data centres. The
software includes features such as chargeback reports and automated
reconfiguration of data paths.
Ken Ayotte, a systems architect at Fidelity, said the mutual
funds company is using Pathline to help its IT staff centrally
manage about half of a San with more than 200Tbyte of data stored
primarily on EMC's Symmetrix disc arrays and IBM's Shark
devices.
By the end of the year, Fidelity plans to use the software to
manage all of the networked storage, Ayotte added.
Fidelity has already been autoprovisioning its storage devices
for the past 18 months with its own software. Switching to a
commercial application has let the company free up several systems
architects who had been working to maintain the in-house
technology, said Ayotte.
"For anybody who's got a team of architects, that's the last
thing you want them doing full time," he said. "You want them
looking out into the future and doing architect work."
Storage administrators at Fidelity sometimes handle more than
100 provisioning requests per month, which can translate into
hundreds of changes to the company's San. IT departments could save
hundreds of man-hours on a monthly basis by moving from a manual
provisioning model to the homegrown application.
The addition of Pathline is giving Fidelity the ability to tie
available storage capacity on the San to specific applications and
then provision the disc space for "an application instead of a
server", Ayotte said.
Switching to the packaged software has also helped the company
automate tasks such as storage inventory management, San
performance monitoring and device configuration.