Question of the Month: What software tools do you use to manage your storage systems? "We're currently using HP Essentials and Command View 8.0 (for all storage types and vendors), and ECC 6.0 for our EMC storage. We rely heavily on Cisco Fabric Manager to manage the SAN and topology." --Paul M. Macht, senior enterprise architect, IT, Duke Medicine, Duke University Health System, Durham, NC "Currently, I just use the software that came with our storage [IBM] and VMware Virtual Infrastructure; all of our SAN is dedicated to a single VMFS volume." --Chad S. Mawson, IT manager, Woods & Aitken LLP, Lincoln, NE "We don't use any glossy sales brochure-oriented 'enterprise management blah blah blah,' just operating system tools. We use Command View EVA, which comes with our HP systems, which you have to use. We make heavy use of the SSSU [Storage System Scripting Utility] command line facility. It's nice that HP allows multiple arrays to be managed from one system, but most unfortunate that it has to be Microsoft Windows. And I've written a bunch of programs on AIX and OpenVMS platforms, and some reporting programs using XSLT templates to process XML output." --Tom O'Toole, San Diego