Big Data Meets Big Pipes
Storage area networks emerge as a primary driver for metro nets
By Joe McGarvey
The buzz surrounding optical networking already is loud enough to rattle an eardrum, but service providers looking to exploit the bandwidth-multiplying characteristics of fiber optic networks haven't even started to crank up the volume.
Having found an answer to raw capacity constraints in the form of dense wavelength division multiplexing and optical switching gear, carriers and service providers are now looking to offer services to turn an abundance of bandwidth into an embarrassment of riches. The burgeoning storage arena could be just what they're looking for.
"There's a natural synergy between the storage industry and the optical industry," says Marianne Wu, director of business development at ONI Systems, a manufacturer of optical networking gear for the metropolitan portion of the public network. "Storage providers require huge amounts of data to be transported, and optical networks have the capacity and complexity to do that."
Optical players such as Adva Networks, Alidian Networks, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and ONI Systems have announced partnerships with mainstays of the storage area networks market, such as Brocade Communications Systems, Computer Network Technology and Gadzoox Networks. One relationship blossomed into a full-blown marriage, with Cisco purchasing NuSpeed Internet Systems for $450 million in late July.
"Optical networking is the last missing piece to open the floodgates in the storage industry," says Ron Kline, an analyst with Ryan Hankin Kent.
Small change
The availability of high-speed optical networks in the metropolitan region is about to profoundly accelerate the growth of the storage industry. The ability to harness light power at the access portion of the network is giving service providers the tools to make storage services affordable to small and medium-sized businesses.
"Right now the customer base for storage services is the leading-edge financial companies and other sophisticated users," says Marc Josephson, chief executive at IntelliSpace, a competitive service provider that recently launched a SAN service in New York. "But now we can start to service lots of different customers on the same fiber."
For several years, IntelliSpace has been offering off-site storage and disaster recovery services to financial firms in Manhattan by lighting up dedicated fiber optic lines between Wall Street and a data center on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. Costly to both operate and purchase, the service appealed only to the financial elite, says Josephson, adding that federal law mandates banks and other financial institutions maintain data backups on facilities operating under a different power grid.
The emergence of optical networking gear in the metropolitan network that can divide a strand of fiber into multiple channels is making it possible for service providers to offer storage services that fit within the budgets of smaller businesses.
Many of the dozens of optical networking companies focused on the metro area are pitching storage as the primary justification for service providers to invest in DWDM gear for the access portion of their network. Take away SAN services, say many industry experts, and the case for DWDM in the metro network is considerably weakened.
Natural channel
Storage is a good fit with DWDM because of the attributes inherent in Fibre Channel, the technology of choice for SANs. Storage systems based on Fibre Channel deliver data in huge blocks, but they are sensitive to latency and require data channels that are big and fast - at least a gigabit per second. In the past, this has meant that service providers needed to burn up an entire fiber to offer SAN services.
"What we're helping to do is drive the economics for service providers," says Bob Lefkowits, vice president of marketing at optical networking startup Alidian. "Since leasing the fiber is the biggest cost resource, it's clearly in the service provider's best interest to get the best revenue-bearing services over that fiber."
In addition to simply multiplying the bandwidth, new optical networking gear enables service providers to build ring and mesh networks, which offer multiple advantages over point-to-point dark fiber connections, says Bruce Gordon, vice president of marketing at StorageNetworks. "Now we're at the point where you have multiple service connections to multiple devices in a metro network," says Gordon. "You get protection and tremendous economies of operation."
With its recent IPO, StorageNetworks may be the best known of a new breed of so-called SSPs (storage service providers) - companies setting up as storage outsourcers for the corporate market. Other would-be SSPs include Compaq Computer, Storability and StorageWay.
Right place, right time
In a sense, however, optical networking is not fueling the surge in storage services as much as it happens to be in the right place at the right time.
"The amount of storage capacity needed by companies is at least doubling every year," says Peter Tarrant, vice president of strategic marketing at Brocade. With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, not only are corporate data storage needs soaring, but also the value of the data collected and the possible penalties involved in losing it have increased tremendously, notes Tarrant.
What makes optical equipment the superior transport medium for storage is that it is able to deliver Fibre Channel in its native form. An IP, Ethernet or even ATM connection would require Fibre Channel-encased information to be bent and twisted into different shapes and sizes before it reached its destination. Optical transport gear with a Fibre Channel interface essentially enables a Fibre Channel connection to be stretched over a metropolitan network.
"What comes out the other end is a clean signal," says Gordon of StorageNetworks. "Anyone that is doing optical networking gear with a Fibre Channel interface is essentially providing an extension cord."
Manipulation of the Fibre Channel protocol is still required to extend the reach of the protocol beyond 10 km. Recognizing that extending the reach of Fibre Channel is best left to companies that have been working with the protocol for years, optical networking companies have been teaming with Fibre Channel switch makers such as Brocade.
An arrangement between Alidian and Gadzoox, for example, has even made it possible to place two Fibre Channel connections on a 2.5-Gbps wavelength, further increasing the benefits of mixing DWDM-based optical gear with storage services.
All of these factors are combining to create one of the first real opportunities for bandwidth providers to offer a value-added service that is actually recognized as a legitimate value for enterprise customers.
"The need to manage data is just exploding," says ONI's Wu. "It's a great way for service providers to help customers meet business needs rather than to just provide bandwidth."
theneteconomy.com
Some interesting connections to watch:
--- EMC and CNT have had a long-standing relationship that was recently elevated to another level with the general availability of SRDF over IP (again, based on CNT's SAN over IP technology) and the exclusive marketing access given to CNT to the SRDF installed base for the extended distance component of EMC's comprehensive solution. What makes this even more significant is the fact that EMC has major alliances with the top optical networking players -- Nortel, Cisco, and Lucent -- and has qualified all the metro products of the Big 3 -- Nortel Optera, Lucent's Optistar and Cisco's Metro 1500.
--- Cisco outsourced its Metro 1500 product from ADVA Optical, which is also the provider of the metro products from Siemens (Waveline EL2) and Alcatel (Optinex 1690), two traditional top-tier telecom equipment suppliers. CNT and ADVA Optical forged a strategic alliance in early 1998 so CNT is ideally positioned no matter who wins.
cnt.com
--- Lucent and Gadzoox are supporting one SCSI over IP protocol before the standards committee in competition with IBM/Cisco, Nishan and a host of other startups. Nortel and CNT are apparently supporting the key protocols in CNT's SAN over IP platform for standardization. Note that of all the vendors, CNT is the only one shipping actual products to the mainframe/Unix (large scale systems) powerhouses -- EMC, IBM/Cisco, Hitachi/HWP, Storagetek/Sun, and Amdahl(Fujitsu). CNT is also the only one with an actual track record selling this type of mission-critical solution to the Global 2000.
--- Laurence Perlman, the co-chairman of Seagate, sits on the board of CNT. Seagate owns a piece of Gadzoox. CNT and Gadzoox have had a working relationship since early 1998. Among the big 3, Lucent seems to be the most aggressive in providing native support for Fibre channel across the MAN. That makes its work with Gadzoox and Vixel most intriguing.
.......Designed for data centers and large enterprises, Lucent's OptiStar EdgeSwitch provides a way to deploy high-speed optics to the network edge -- dramatically increasing the capacity of wide area network (WAN) access. This small, cost-effective device can be used in existing local networks to provide optical backbone connectivity at speeds up to 2.5 gigabits per second (Gb/s). In addition, an upcoming feature on the EdgeSwitch will extend storage networking across the optical backbone by mapping Fibre Channel -- a networking protocol used for storage access -- to the Internet Protocol (IP) in an approach called "Fibre Channel over IP."
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