ORLANDO - A handful of big-name vendors - from BMC Software to IBM - this week at Storage Networking World will roll out products for making storage more flexible and easier to manage across networks.

BMC's new Patrol Storage Automation - Provisioning module can eliminate much of the manual labor involved in assigning, configuring and managing arrays, switches, host operating systems, volume managers and file systems within storage environments. BMC says the software, which works with its Patrol Storage Manager, can reduce the number of steps in a process such as assigning additional storage to an application from as many as 60 to just a few.

"Automated provisioning is one of the first obvious areas where automated, policy-based management makes sense," says Anders Lofgren, a senior analyst for Giga Information Group. "This can have obvious cost-reduction benefits as well as improve service levels in regard to meeting the capacity needs of applications."

Initially the BMC software will work with EMC and Hitachi arrays, Brocade and McData Fibre Channel switches, Veritas Software Volume Manager and File System, as well as the Universal File System, NT File System and Oracle databases.

The new module will be available next month starting at $8,000 per terabyte managed.

Also: A Q&A with Veritas VP Mark Bregman on EMC, Cisco, Sun and more

Separately, Computer Associates will air BrightStor ARCserve Backup Version 9, which has an improved administrative interface that the company says should enable even non-IT personnel to install the package and schedule back-up operations. The upgraded software also can be used to isolate backups over specific network adapters as opposed to running back-up operations across a number of adapters and potentially interfering with other network traffic.

Also new in ARCserve Backup Version 9 is support for the Network Data Management Protocol. This protocol lets traffic run over dedicated links between a server and storage device rather than over a company's main Ethernet pipes.

CA also has simplified ARCserve pricing, whereas before software for different operating systems or capabilities might have been priced differently. CA now charges $700 per master server and starts pricing for individual agents for server-to-server backup at $200.