Some testimonials of just a couple players...
SANs Appeal -- Vendors bulk up SAN switches to meet providers' expanding storage needs
Amy Larsen DeCarlo
On face value, storage may not be very sexy. But just try to deliver profitable managed data services without a cost-effective storage architecture that can expand to support the never-ending increase in data. Suddenly, fast, scalable storage isn't just attractive; it's critical business for applications service providers (ASPs).
The exponential growth in the volume of voice, video and text that service providers need to store for their customers-and the high cost of managing that data-has them scrambling for simpler and cheaper alternatives to conventional server-based storage solutions. Increasingly, that substitute is a storage-area network (SAN) that operates separately from the transmission network. Market research firm Gartner Group Inc. (Stamford, Conn.) projects that 80 percent of the world's external storage will be connected to a SAN by 2004. Because SANs are optimized to move storage data quickly and efficiently, they are also less expensive to administer than server-attached storage because information technology (IT) managers can centrally manage colossal amounts of data.
The need for more data storage at a lower price point has ASPs, large corporations and emerging startups looking outside to storage service providers (SSPs) to essentially create a storage network for their customers. "We had no choice but to get involved in SANs," says John Orr, president and CEO of Stack Computer Corp. (Costa Mesa, Calif.), a professional IT services organization that designs, implements and supports mission-critical applications for multinational companies. "Our customers' storage capacities were escalating fast."
Anxious to cash in on the demand for new gear to help build out providers' SAN infrastructures, vendors are beginning to provide new higher port density switches that can move massive amounts of storage traffic at gigabit speeds between SAN servers and users. McData Corp. (Broomfield, Colo.) currently has a virtual lock on the market's very high end, with more than 98 percent of the sales for highly redundant, high port density director-class switches. But other vendors want to pick up a percentage of the business.
Hoping to give McData a run for its money, Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) last month laid out a product road map squarely focused on McData's target customers-ASPs, SSPs and other providers looking for highly redundant SAN solutions. The company will deliver 64- and 128-port core Fabric Fibre Channel switches that interoperate with its current SAN switches. The SAN gear can switch storage traffic at 2 Gbit/s. Service providers can also group ports logically through interswitch link (ISL) trunking to transmit traffic at up to 8 Gbit/s. Individual SAN islands also can be interconnected over metropolitan-area networks (MANs) using dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) and the Internet protocol (IP).
The first switch to support the architecture, Brocade's Silkworm 6400, will ship in March of next year. With its Silkworm 6400 switch, Brocade takes aim at the high-capacity, highly redundant director-class switches from companies like McData. The Silkworm 6400 is made up of six integrated switch modules that are compatible with Brocade's existing products. And because that switch is built on a modular architecture, providers can add more ports as they need more capacity. One of the biggest cost issues for providers today is having to purchase more storage than they currently need to support future capacity, according to Jay Kidd, vice president of product marketing for Brocade. Then they underutilize that capacity until they need it, paying for it all the while, he says.
But it may not be exactly the same. While Brocade has built redundancy into its switch, its redundancy is not completely comparable to a director switch, according to Nick Allen, Gartner Group vice president and research director. "Brocade has made it easier to configure more storage capacity, and they've added insurance," he says. "But it's like term-life instead of whole-life insurance. It ain't the full monty."
The Silkworm 6400, the company's highest port density switch thus far, carries a 50 percent lower price tag than comparable existing switches, Kidd says. Stack Computer's Orr, who uses SAN products from a number of vendors, including both Brocade and McData, is even more enthusiastic: "In terms of price, reliability and feature set, nothing else in the market comes close to [the Silkworm 6400]."
Beyond its cost, scalability and performance, the Silkworm 6400 claims two other crucial features that have traditionally been the domain of director-class switches-redundancy and high reliability. Redundancy built into the switch fabric removes any single point of failure, which Brocade claims gives it 99.999 percent (or five 9's) availability. Orr says his experience with other Brocade products gives him confidence that the vendor's latest switch can meet those numbers. "Their switches never go down," he says.
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