A storage area network (SAN) is a high-speed, high-bandwidth inter-server network utilizing integrated hardware and software to provide a robust, high-speed storage backbone. A SAN enables clusters of servers to share storage with exclusive data access or to share data on common storage devices, depending on the SAN topology. SAN networks are useful, for example, in fully networked enterprises that require storage of terabytes of information collected on each customer and each transaction. The need for high availability and security of data adds to escalating requirements. SANs offer fast, available pools of storage that can be shared throughout an enterprise, yet managed through simplified operations.
SANs include large collections of storage elements, such as multiple hard disk drives, tapes, etc. To ensure performance in known SANs, data and performance metrics are gathered. These metrics are used to determine performance trends and statistics that are used to anticipate possible problems (such as bandwidth bottlenecks) so that measures can be taken to alleviate the problems before they occur.
In a SAN or other storage environment according to the conventional art, it is known to run a storage area manager (SAM) process on a server within the SAN. As its name implies, the SAM, in part, manages the interaction between components of the storage environment as well as interaction of application programs having storage needs (clients) within components of the storage environment.
Conventional SAMs receive events from components of the storage environment and react, but are a fixed size with fixed capability, and static in their operation, namely, when an event is received by a SAM, the SAM knows which functional modules must be called to process any given message in the event and those functional modules must be available or the message must wait.