An article which helps me understand SAN: (from UPSIDE today). No mention of CMNT but many companies with which we are connected one way or another.
Hollywood's Tech Hit
Industry Update
August 27, 1999
by Dennis Eskow
Hollywood is worried about money. According to a recent Standard & Poor's
survey, the average film today costs $70 million to make. Another $5 million
goes into a movie's promotion and distribution. And converting a film into
the darling of the new formats--digital video disk (DVD)--requires a
seven-figure budget. So when a technology comes along that can compress
production time and keep production systems from crashing, Hollywood is
among the first to adopt it.
Tinseltown's latest technology hit is storage area networks (SANs), a
nascent category that is giving old-line storage companies like EMC Corp. of
Hopkinton, Mass., and Seagate Technology Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif., a
new life--and creating opportunities for relative newcomers like
fiber-switch makers Gadzoox Networks Inc. and Brocade Communications Systems
Inc., both of San Jose.
"We upgrade systems every six months," says Don Ecklund, VP of engineering
for Sony Pictures Entertainment, a division of Sony Corp. that has produced
more than 200 DVDs in its California studios. "So when we learned about
storage area networks and what they can do, we moved right in and adopted
them." The result, he says, was deep cuts in the time it takes to make a DVD
and, thus, cuts in production costs.
What is a SAN? A SAN is a networking strategy that isolates stored
information from the rest of the network. In a SAN, the storage devices
connect to the server independently, providing a dedicated path to the data
center. And that path is built on a high-speed transmission technology
called a Fibre Channel.
In the real world outside Hollywood, not every company will be able to
immediately capitalize on the cost-saving benefits of SANs as Sony did.
Vendors are still working out compatibility issues among SAN solution parts,
and open standards between vendors are a way off. But as the always-on
Internet pushes companies' data stores to bursting, an enterprise storage
architecture that makes data easier to maintain and continuously available
is increasingly attractive.
Focusing the market
Dominated at present by mainframe-based systems, the SAN market was worth $2
billion in 1999, according to Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts
Inc., a Santa Barbara, Calif., market consulting firm specializing in
storage and storage management. About 85 percent of the market is for
storage hardware, Neema says. Another 13 percent is software and the
remaining 2 percent is switches, a relatively new and hot category of
storage product needed to run a SAN.
Drilling down, the total SAN hardware market, which includes storage systems
and Fibre Channel hubs and switches, is expected to reach $11.4 billion by
2002, according to January 1999 statistics from International Data Corp.
(IDC), Framingham, Mass. (See "Worldwide SAN hardware market," left.) "The
demand for SANs is not being pushed by vendors, but it is being pulled by
customers who have to deal with unpredictable traffic streams tying up their
networks," says analyst Emmy Johnson of Cahners In-Stat Group, Newton, Mass.
"Especially on the Web, with its 24-hour service model, organizations want
to be sure that Internet connections will be available at all times."
In some ways, SANs are as old as the hills. Before there were SANs there was
Escon, for enterprise systems connections, the mainframe storage technology
developed in the 1980s by IBM Corp. As with SANs, Escon sped up storage and
made it more reliable. It also allowed users to split the application from
the storage, where both used to sit on a single application server. Banks,
stock exchanges and financial clearinghouses seized on the new technology
and turned it into a multibillion-dollar industry almost overnight.
The secret to Escon was fiber-attached storage (FAS) devices. With copper
attachments, the storage device always had to be located a few feet from the
server. But when fiber optics arrived, corporations could locate the storage
far from the server, even in another building. IBM, Hitachi Data Systems
Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., EMC and a slew of small companies quickly
optimized their mainframe systems with software that allowed system
architects to set up storage devices on "farms."
In today's distributed computing model, corporations have vital information
on servers all over the place. So the servers of a pharmaceutical company
might be located in the headquarters building for accounting and inventory,
in the research labs for connections to subcontractors and in a remote
customer-service center halfway across the country. Fiber attachments
between the local storage devices and a local server can easily be set up
with simple FAS systems. But some of the buildings located at great
distances need a communications switch to get into the network. Also,
managing the data requires sophisticated software that can find the fastest
path between servers or move the load off an overloaded storage device and
place it on another. Enter SANs.
Players to watch
The leading vendors in the SAN market include those that sell complete SAN
solutions (EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Compaq Computer Corp. and Hitachi
Data Systems); and makers of fiber opticðconnected storage devices (Seagate
and Storage Technology Corp., Louisville, Colo.), SAN switches (Brocade and
Gadzoox) and software (Legato Systems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., and Veritas
Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif.).
Some traditional storage hardware vendors are moving into the SAN arena
through acquisition. Storage Technology Corp., or StorageTek, for instance,
acquired Network Systems Corp. of Minneapolis, a vendor of high-performance
internetworking products, to build both FAS and SAN systems. "Our most
important strategy is to be open," says StorageTek's chief strategist, Walt
Tinton. "We currently operate with Compaq, Dell [Computer Corp.], Sun
[Microsystems Inc.], IBM RS/6000 and other [hardware] systems. We count the
big enterprise vendors--IBM, Sun, HP and EMC--as our key competitors."
Openness is a key theme for customers as well. The Online Computer Library
Center (OCLC), which serves data to 30,000 libraries, has networked 20
Windows NT Servers with a system that includes IBM, Tandem and other
hardware. "The StorageTek [SAN] solution lets Sun and NT servers share the
same storage," says Jerry Lynch, director of OCLC's operations division. "We
want to put the whole data center on a single SAN eventually."
Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to buy an all-in-one SAN solution
that's totally open. "Those looking for whole enterprise solutions are
probably looking at EMC, but [it] provides a proprietary solution--not
everything works with [its] SAN," says Richard Scocozza, technology analyst
with Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York.
For that reason, the companies to watch in the SAN space are those that
market the SAN system components, not the storage device makers, according
to Scocozza. "The market for switches and software is going to grow at a
healthy rate in the next two to three years," Scocozza says. "This year,
that market is south of $50 million. But the people who make the SAN
hardware are going to be bigger customers now that the market is taking
off."
Veritas and Legato, for instance, develop software that manages SANs and
optimizes them for greater performance, more system uptime and increased
security. Gadzoox and Brocade were among the first makers of fiber-connected
switches designed especially for SANs. Combined with storage hardware, these
switches form systems that almost never crash.
For a company like the Internet Travel Network <http://www.itn.com> (ITN)
of Palo Alto, Calif., which does thousands of transactions an hour for
people making travel connections and hotel reservations online, that's a
crucial selling point. "Our goal is to have zero planned and unplanned
outages," says Al Whaley, ITN's chief technology officer. Some of his
large-scale systems use storage from mainframe vendor EMC. But for his NT
boxes, Whaley feels he may have to wait for complete SAN solutions. Not
everything runs the way it's supposed to run on today's bleeding-edge SANs.
"Oracle [Corp. database] replication is not really integrated into the SAN
technology," Whaley says, adding that Oracle data stored on the SANs he has
tested doesn't always replicate properly, meaning the data being used by one
department may not match the data being used by another. "The vendors are
working on it, but this is still relatively young technology."
Will vendors open up?
While each vendor whacks away at the compatibility issues for its own SAN
products, two industry groups are racing to come up with a single standard
for interoperability. But experts like IDC's John McArthur say the battle
between the Storage Networking Industry Association and the Fibre Alliance
will not produce standards in the near future. "Neither group is an official
standards body," McArthur notes. "Standards are a beautiful thing when you
want everything to work together well. But standards don't help with
time-to-market. So companies build a de facto standard and try to force the
issue."
The SAN technology is so young that few analysts will bet on any vendor's
standard. But once SAN compatibility issues are settled, whol new
storage-over-the-Internet services can take off. Providers of virtual
storage via the Web, like StoragePoint Inc. of San Diego, are beginning to
move up the food chain from small companies to larger enterprises. "We have
a few contracts with corporate clients," says Chairman and CEO Scott
Zimmerman. "This industry will be a good customer of SAN technology when it
is a completely open technology."
An in-demand technology that provides cost benefits and is based on open
standards? Sounds like a sugarcoated script more suited to Hollywood than
the computing industry. Stay tuned.
DVD Production Values
The making of a digital video disk (DVD) involves editing, mixing, encoding
and remixing all the data in a movie--and then some. In the days before
storage area networks (SANs), a film DVD could take weeks or months to make.
That's because the multistep process was done on separate workstations and
then shipped back and forth between departments as various pieces were
finished.
But in the post-SAN era, the process takes days. The 1998 "Mask of Zorro"
remake starring Antonio Banderas was one of the first film projects for
which Sony used its new DVD production system powered by a SAN storage array
from Storage Computer Corp., Nashua, N.H. The setup allowed various
production workers to do their jobs at the same time, swapping data back and
forth and using the SAN to deliver data-rich visual images at high speeds.
Before a DVD project starts, the film first goes to the Sony High-Definition
Center where it is transferred to digital tape. Sony VP of Engineering Don
Ecklund says all film is now converted to a
digital tape format to make it readily transferable to any medium.
Meanwhile, in the client studio, additional DVD segments are created,
including interviews with the stars, video games related to the movie and
trivia questions.
Each DVD includes a menu with the time and location of each segment to help
users skip to a favorite item. In the past, creating a menu was a lengthy
process that forced the production crew to return frequently to the original
HDTV print. With the SAN element, they access the menu items from a local
disk and the film elements from the digital storage device, which is
accessible to all the production departments at once.
Six video compression stations also reside on the network, constantly
sending MPEG-2 video contents to redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID)
boxes with a total storage capacity of just over 800 gigabytes. These are
constantly archived at sub-100-millisecond speed, faster by half than
pre-SAN networks.
So project engineers, audio and video compression technicians, subtitle
makers (for foreign language segments) and others can access the master
version of the movie and all the other contents repeatedly and virtually at
the same time. And, eventually, Sony can get a DVD version of a swashbuckler
onto store shelves quicker. |
