Novell recently launched Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7, claiming that it "...Delivers New Capacity Tool to Give Deep Insight into...Storage".

First, PlateSpin got so excited about the new capacity planning tool that it actually forgot to post the press release on its own website. However, the parent company, Novell, did the honors.

Second, there is a mention of a "new capacity tool" for storage. There is no new tool - storage planning is a feature of an existing Novell PlateSpin Recon product.

Finally, PlateSpin published a KB article stating the following limitation:

"Another exception to this function is the inability to list attached SAN disks as fiber Channel (FC) storage type for Windows 2003 server platform. This is because Windows 2003 server doesn’t have the required file (hbaapi.mof) which is responsible for identifying the disk type as FC. Therefore, in the properties of inventoried Windows 2003 server, the SAN disk type is listed incorrectly as "Local" under "Storage" tab. This file exists on Windows 2008 server."

The best part is the workaround:

"The work around to address this issue is copying this file from a Windows 2008 server to the Windows 2003 server which has attached SAN drives."

This makes users wonder what other manual work they will have to do to perform storage capacity planning.

If you are looking to get deep insight into storage infrastructure, products like Quest Storage Horizon (formerly MonoSphere) provide excellent capabilities in this space. If you are a solution provider designing storage infrastructure for virtualized environments, then the Storage Design Module in the Lanamark Suite is worth taking a look at.