here's a tech journal's take on your post, walter.
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Computer Reseller News
February 15, 1999, Issue: 829
Section: Sourcing
Working Together: Partnerships Unveiled, SAN Issues Addressed -- Legato Maps Out Information Utility's Future
Joseph F. Kovar
Palo Alto, Calif. -- In the latest group effort to address storage area network (SAN) interoperability issues, Legato Systems Inc. is advancing its Information Utility concept through vendor partnerships.
Several vendors said such alliances benefit VARs by helping ensure that products from multiple suppliers will hook up in a storage network.
Under the Information Utility concept, data storage should be treated as if it were a utility, like electricity or water, Legato executives said. SANs should provide uninterrupted availability of protected data, they said.
Legato, based here, will use its storage-management software in conjunction with other vendors' hardware and software to launch a three-stage approach to SAN interoperability.
In the first stage, relatively simple SANs using the Legato NetWorker application are employed to solve specific storage-management problems, such as LAN-free backup.
In the second stage, Legato will integrate the Celestra technology it acquired as part of its January acquisition of Intelliguard, Dublin, Calif. When embedded in data-storage hardware, the technology allows device-to-device communication without server intervention and enables such applications as server-less backup, SAN-based file replication and mirroring and transparent Hierarchical Storage Management.
In the third stage, SANs will gain proactive management and self-healing capabilities.
"It will tell the administrator, here's how much storage you are using, here's how much data you have, here are some events, here's a SCSI drive which might have a problem," said Edward Cooper, corporate director of strategic marketing at Legato.
Vendors supporting Legato's Information Utility concept include Advanced Digital Information Corp., ATL Products, Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Crossroads Systems Inc., Data General Corp.'s Clariion Division, Exabyte Corp., Gadzoox Networks Inc. and QLogic Corp.
The Information Utility concept addresses data protection, accessibility and uptime, said Mark Ferelli, director of industry analysis at Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Strategic Research Corp. "VARs have had to deal with these problems, but they had few tools," he said.
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Information Utility: Three Stages
Legato wants to treat data as a utility, like electricity or water, offering high availability and protection via storage area networks (SAN). The company has developed a three-stage process:
1- Use simple SAN applications such as LAN-less backup, in which data is backed up through a SAN without going over the LAN.
2- Take management control of data from the server and pass to the data-storage devices for direct device-to-device operation.
3- Add management features in which the storage-management application monitors data, makes suggestions and eventually solves problems with little administrator intervention. |
