NetApp System Manager

So NetApp have announced the release of NetApp System Manager or NSM for short.  This will bring full Microsoft MMC integration to the NetApp product range starting with the FAS2000 and 3000 series.  Despite what others have reported NetApp are adament that this will not replace FilerView, rather it’s in addition to.

NSM will apparently enable users to get a FAS system up and running in under 5 minutes through their Windows server.  Now is this a good thing I wonder?  Surely someone setting up a SAN such as this should have a througher understanding of the system and be more confident in setting it up through the cli?  NSM will apparently come with Best Practice configurations built in along with a system tray monitoring utility which will certainly be a bonus.

What will they be offering for us OSX or *nix users?  I know myself and quite a few of my clients don’t use Windows as their primary OS so perhaps a cross platform tool would have been a better option.  We’ll wait and see I guess.

More info can be found here and details on the beta build when it is released can be found here.