For best of breed in storage-management tools, our readers chose HP OpenView Storage Area Manager (SAM) software. SAM simplifies and automates the management of multivendor storage resources across disk, tape, direct-attached, and network storage infrastructures. From its central management console, the software lets you effectively monitor and manage your storage devices and storage service availability, performance, usage, cost, and growth across a distributed environment to optimize resource usage. To help you move toward integrated service-driven storage management, SAM lets you define, monitor, and measure storage service levels and view storage services as an integral part of IT services.
The SAM software suite consists of five products, which you can use individually or together, to address your storage management problems: Storage Node Manager, for device management; Storage Builder, for capacity management; Storage Optimizer, for performance management; Storage Accountant, for metering and billing; and Storage Allocater, for access control and storage allocation.