The rapid pace of development in information technology has resulted in tremendous demand growth for large amounts of data storage. In order to reduce network loads, increase available bandwidth, and provide the infrastructure necessary to store these large amounts of data, network enterprises are increasingly employing specialized networks dedicated to storage, often referred to as a storage area network or a storage attached network (SAN). SAN implementations can provide streamlined solutions for archiving, backing up, and replicating data, among other things. For example, by providing a distinct high-speed network, dedicated for storage and backup, these types of networks can improve data management capabilities, access and availability of data, and the performance of supported systems, among other things.
In light of these storage demands, however, designing a proper storage solution for an enterprise requires acute awareness of existing infrastructure and other resources that may be impacted. Even when designing an enterprise storage solution from the ground up, issues such as future interoperability and efficiency are significant considerations. In spite of the benefits of dedicated storage network, difficulties often arise because hardware elements and drivers may be heterogeneous, or may be provided by a variety of vendors, or may be based on a wide variety of communication protocols and interface standards, among other things. Further, for various reasons, network organization, zoning parameters, load sharing, or other characteristics of a SAN may be changed or modified often. As such, soft deployment of a SAN network design (e.g., configuring settings and parameters thereof) can often present interconnectivity or interoperability issues, among other things, which must be properly dealt with. Moreover, effective enterprise operation should not suffer (e.g., due to downtime or other factors) simply because a network design is being updated (e.g., to incorporate new networking products, standards, and/or protocols, or to replace a failed devices, etc.). As a network design increases in scale, which is inevitable in large organizations, these problems become exacerbated, as deployment supervised solely by human operators tends to be tedious and error prone.
Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.