Pizza, Beer and iSNS
Just a quick summary on our Monday night adventure at the DMA Science Fair, where we set up a booth to demo our webapp for managing iSNS servers. Our goal was to spread awareness of this soon-to-be-released management tool among the Data Management Ambassadors, get some test drives from these folks to gain usability insights, and ideally set the stage for an ongoing dialogue. Overall, we succeeded: half-a-dozen-or-so DMAs expressed a desire to follow up, including downloading the product, demo'ing it to their customers, and in most cases staying in touch with us to help shape ongoing product evolution.
A secondary goal of consuming pizza and beer during big-screen Monday Night Football was also attained. Life is good.
To backup a bit: iSNS is a value-add technology supporting management of IP SANs, in particular providing centralized access control between iSCSI initiators and targets. This becomes an increasingly compelling mechanism as the number of iSCSI nodes grows: no more sneaker-net to connect storage consumers and providers. The handout we provided at the fair elaborates a bit, including a big-picture view of the tool's functionality.
As our low-tech poster board (uh, flip-chart and magic marker...only because we couldn't find a typewriter) claimed at the fair, here are the Top 10 Reasons to Use the ISNS Web-based Management App:
- Friendly wizards to guide tasks
- Intuitive layout - no need to recall CLI syntax
- Use the iSNS webapp, or the puppy gets hurt
- Simple presentation for junior administrators
- AJAX, baby! Check out the "quick-find" feature!
- Agile: we'll adapt quickly to new feature requests
- Co-exists in Lockhart console w/other mgmt apps
- Point-n-click for mgmt nirvana ("Backspace? We don't need no steenkin' backspace key!")
- Your input helps guide the evolution of the tool
- A perfect complement to the iSNS CLI
Our key takeaways from discussions with the DMAs are these:
(1) There is lots of interest out there around iSCSI, and iSNS plays right into it. The DMAs were pleasantly surprised to see we even had such a thing. They feel their customers would use it.
(2) There are market opportunities in Windows shops that we've yet to exploit - but, we can only get in via appliances, because these shops do not want CLIs. We discussed getting iSNS in via the appliance OS as our on-ramp, and this is an approach favored by various DMAs.
(3) The iSNS BUI (Browser User Interface), as it stands, has some usability concerns - and this is exactly what we were hoping to uncover, so this is a half-full glass. In particular, while engaging some DMAs with typical task flows, we realized the need to expose a comprehensive node-centric view of the iSNS hierarchy ("what
targets can this initiator see? what initiators can see this target? is this particular node in an active domain set? which domain sets do I need to activate to establish communication?"), we need a domain-centric parent view ("what domain sets does this
domain belong to? which ones are active?"), and we need a network-entity child view ("what LUNs are part of this box?").
Adapting to provide this new functionality will, thankfully, not require any changes to the iSNS server data model or API: we've already transformed that XML-based data model into a web-tier-resident relational database to facilitate these unforeseen query needs (and likely many more to come). As an aside: the ability to fashion new queries on-the-fly, without having to restructure the backend to support this (aka ad-hoc query), is one of the big advantages of relational technology. And that's a whole other topic that I look forward to writing about. Meanwhile, here's an overview of the architecture for the web-tier.
Our 2007 Science Fair adventure is an example of Engage the Customer, which is the first of my various ease-of-use bullet points. Additionally, as per our ability to quickly provide new queries and views without undue pain, we've already benefited from Adjust your Process to Allow for Course Corrections...and with quick-and-easy-answers to the key questions listed above, we Design for Optimized User Experience. This quick-and-easy-answer ability demonstrates some of the value-add of a BUI/GUI that complements a CLI.
