SAN appliances to simplify heterogeneous networks
This story was printed from PC Week, located at zdnet.com.
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SAN appliances to simplify heterogeneous
networks
By Sonia R. Lelii, eWEEK
June 4, 2000 9:00 PM PT
URL: zdnet.com
The nagging problem of building a heterogeneous SAN may have a simple answer: an emerging type of appliance that displays all of a storage area network's capacity in a virtual pool that can be managed from a central location.
Companies such as Dell Computer Corp., DataCore Software Corp., Compaq Computer Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. are hanging their hats on such SAN appliances, which promise to
increase storage capacity usage from about 40 percent to 90 percent.
Dell is negotiating an OEM agreement with StorageApps Inc., of Lawrenceville, N.J., said sources close to Dell. The Round Rock, Texas, computer maker plans to use StorageApps'
San.OS and the SanSuite, which does virtualization. Dell officials declined to comment. Dell's OEM pact is expected to be announced in several weeks.
Dell had hoped to accomplish the same goal internally when it purchased in September startup ConvergNet Technologies Inc., Dell's first and, so far, only acquisition. But ConvergNet's Storage Domain Manager product has been hit with delays. The product was due last year, but Dell
officials now say it will ship at the end of this year.
"It's not a trivial thing to do," said Steve Duplessie, an analyst at market researcher Enterprise Storage Group, in Milford, Mass. "[But] I think it is key. All of a sudden, it doesn't matter if I have a [Windows] NT server and a Solaris server on the same SAN."
DataCore, of San Jose, Calif., last week announced SANsymphony, which virtualizes SAN storage in a central location and uses a high-performance storage-pool cache memory for no effect on performance. The software resides in a device that sits on the network and can divide a 36GB disk drive into several logical partitions, each allocated to a different host.
This week at Gartner Group Inc.'s Storage in the .com World conference, in Orlando, Fla., Compaq will give a sneak preview of its SAN appliance, the SanWorks Management Appliance. A key feature of the product is its new VersaStor software, which handles the virtualization and "out of band" technology that lets it function out of the I/O path, said Compaq officials in Houston.
The product is due next year.
Over the course of the next year, Veritas, of Mountain View, Calif., will release appliances with features such as backup, discovery, extended management and replication. |
