Scalability in system management GUIs: A designer's nightmare

As Information Technology (IT) advances, traditional concerns over performance are being overtaken by concerns over manageability and scalability in system management interfaces [1]. Designing effective interactions and representations of large complex systems with intricate relationships among components is a formidable challenge. In this paper we describe the design of a topology viewer application for enterprise-scale storage systems. A key issue in this design effort was to create a graphical topology viewer that would scale to the complexity of typical storage environments and support administrators effectively in various activities. Our approach to address these issues was to use semantic zooming and progressive information disclosure techniques extensively; thus essentially shifting the scalability challenge from purely visual design to mostly interaction design.