Java-Based Jiro Builds New Storage Management Supports.

Editor's Note: Jiro (pronounced gyro as in gyroscope) technology provides a middle layer of components and services that facilitate connectivity between managed resources and management applications. These resources can be anywhere on the corporate network, connected with any combination of routers and hubs, and use any standard management protocol such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The complete Jiro architecture will also include support for other industry standard APIs and protocols and extensions for additional security and storage network specific functionality.

The code is platform-independent, necessary for applications to distribute their management services across a network of storage devices enabled with a Java Virtual Machine. There is no need for developers to port their management tools to multiple operating systems or to include additional code to recognize and inter-operate with specific devices because the components are universal.

The Jiro management layer supplies basic management functions such as fault notification, scheduling, distributed logging, and transaction rollback. In addition, the technology provides intelligent network connectivity such as enterprise-wide discovery and lookup, which enable devices to transparently connect to the network and identify themselves as available resources to other devices and management tools. The collective group of devices can act as a single, logical unit for management applications.

Denise Shiffman, VP of marketing at Sun Microsystems Network Storage, offered some thoughts on the new technology with CTR editor-in-chief Mark Ferelli.

MARK: What need does Jiro meet in the marketplace?

DENISE: We make storage networks a lot simpler to manage so that we could automate management services and distribute those management services across the network. So we could have developed this and kept it proprietary because it really does provide significant functionality when you develop it in your application. Yet we thought, since the customers really want to be able to manage heterogeneous SANs, that we would give the technology away to the community for free. So we opened up our arms and brought in a lot of storage industry leaders into an open process to define the specification for the technology and they helped us refine it and build it in a way that they would want to use it. What we announced, essentially, was first the name of the specification--the Federated Management Architecture--that the specification is complete, and that the reference implementation, the code that proves that this specification works, was finalized. They passed the test; we could prove that it worked and that's all done. Secondarily, we're announcing that Sun is now shipping its Jiro technology developers release, which is our version of that reference implementation, so that developers can get started today developing their management services using Jiro technology.

MARK: Are you not licensing this technology or are you basically making the code available without strings?

DENISE: It's a freely available license; it's a license because we want to manage compatibility with the platform. The only important clause in there is to require compatibility.

MARK: SAN implementations are notorious for not being able to work interoperably with multiple platforms. How would you address that in this new specification?

DENISE: There are two different levels to that question. One level is at the very low Fibre Channel level where the Fibre Channel specification wasn't quite detailed enough or wasn't quite complete and there were some issues in switch APIs and some of the vendors are implementing differently. So there's the device level APIs in Fibre Channel where there are issues and implementations for true interoperability across anybody's switch or device.

A step up, a layer above, is that the management level, where management services is instigating a backup, stopping a backup, setting policies for how the environment is run or managed, the rules around the resources, and resource allocation, is not in the data path. It's in the management path and everybody's applications--Legato's backup application, the Veritas volume management application and Ancor's switch management interface--has a management interface in every single device that we ship. All of those management interfaces use the simple Jiro technology so that they can be represented on the network and communicate with each other. You get automatic interoperability of the management function on your network. Everything can communicate.

MARK: How about an example?

DENISE: Say, you had five different disk arrays in your environment that all had a different backup application associated with them, maybe because they were still attached to the server and they were different servers. You wanted to launch backup from one place, which is what customers beg us for: one launching pad. You would need your management console to be able to communicate automatically with all those different backup applications and Jiro makes that possible. It gives a standard programming interface for making that possible.

MARK: Do those device level complications, which you mentioned earlier, still persist?

DENISE: Yes. They still persist and what we did was make sure Jiro only played above that environment. So, if a customer chooses to use, say, standard old SNMP, they can still communicate in a Jiro environment. If they use what SNIA is really driving, the SIM implementation for representing your device, Jiro works with SIM. If there is a proprietary API, which your device is using to communicate out information, Jiro works with it.

MARK: Does Jiro and the development that will arise from Jiro address some of the security issues that come up in SAN management?

DENISE: Jiro is based on Java. So it has all of the secure, sort of Java, environment from a programming perspective, but Jiro is in the management path, not in the data path. So there's no impact on the security of the data. Obviously, if you're using Jiro to design your management console, you would use it to set rules on authorization and levels of use for that data, but other than that, it's really how you set policies using Jiro components versus the direct data going to the data path and how that's impacted by security measures.

MARK: What other players aided you in developing the specs?

DENISE: It was StorageTek and Legato and Veritas and Ancor and Exabyte and Quantum and Hitachi Data Systems and Fujitsu.

Note: The text of this interview was printed verbatim.