KJ, Sun has been doing some "thinking" on this. This article is from May, before the Ancor OEM was announced.
Sun, IP & StoreX
westworldproductions.com
At Sun, StoreX Is More Than Just "Pipes And Plumbing"
by Hal Glatzer
Critical to networking, according to Allen, is IP. "Most vendors have connectivity," he said, "but to get the ability to manage a real 'pool' of storage, regardless of who's connected to ..
In 1994 Sun Microsystems produced the Sparq Storage Array, one of the earliest devices to have Fibre-Channel connectivity among SCSI drives. Late in 1997, Sun introduced a newer version that was entirely FC from the host-bus adapter to the (Seagate) disk drives.
"We've shipped over 2.5PB [2500TB] worth of all-fibre subsystems since—more than any other vendor in the industry," said Jeff Allen, vice president of marketing for Sun's network storage division in Newark, CA, where he's the key spokesman for the company's FC and SAN developments
"I believe the storage industry has become confused about what a 'SAN' is," he said. "The word itself has become muddled. Nobody, today, is delivering networking value-add with a SAN. Vendors are just delivering what I call 'pipes and plumbing.' But I think you'll see real advances in networking, starting next year, because vendors are trying to overcome inherent problems. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), for example, has a project underway to promote a common management information base (MIB): that will be a set of APIs that everybody can write to and use."
Allen feels that the very concept of a SAN is not universally understood. "To me, a SAN has two components. First, there are the interconnections that link the host to the storage through a hub or a switch. But the second component is—so far—the missing ingredient: and that's the network itself."
Critical to networking, according to Allen, is IP. "Most vendors have connectivity," he said, "but to get the ability to manage a real 'pool' of storage, regardless of who's connected to it, and for the ability to achieve truly open standards, you need to use IP."
Asked if SAN development is too tightly bound up with FC, Allen said, "FC provides worldwide 'naming'—that is, addressing capabilities. You can get very specific about what's connected to what with FC. If you then provide the right networking solution, you can get some interesting value-add. We believe FC is gaining momentum and we'll continue to enhance our FC solutions. And if something better comes along, we'll integrate that too because we see no reason not to. But whether that something is FC or gigabit Ethernet or even a twisted wire pair is irrelevant."
What is relevant, he feels, is that too much attention has been paid to the "storage" side of SAN development and not enough to the "network" aspect. "A SAN connects server and storage," he said. "But while a SAN may be a storage interconnect, it is not a 'computer' interconnect. It's not intended to be the only connection among the servers or the CPUs. You can have high-performance clusters today, connected over different networks; but those, too, are 'computer' interconnects—they're just high-speed links among CPUs. SANs are growing in importance, but the 'network' aspect is still missing."
Allen is proud that, "At Sun, our core competency is networking. So we're taking the lead in what we call Project StoreX, which we announced last December. Our goal and that of our StoreX partners is an open storage management platform because we have to overcome an important problem. Right now, each hardware vendor has a proprietary management interface to its own [hardware] box; each operating system vendor—including Sun—also has its own proprietary management interface; and so does each application vendor. So if you want to run, say, Oracle with Veritas on a Sun platform, you have three sets of management interfaces, and you'll add more permutations any time you have to add in a different platform, or install a new piece of hardware or another app."
"Suppose one app needs 75GB and another needs 50GB, but there are only 100GB in the SAN. Who gets the resources? Today, there are no service-level agreements to sort that out. But in the world of StoreX, as we see it, among vendors who participate and comply, the management interface of the applications and the OSs and the hardware components can be opened up. And the net result is that administrators can set priorities easily and directly," adds Allen
"Here's another situation that StoreX addresses: Imagine you're a switch vendor, such as Brocade. How many platforms should you have to write an interface for? With StoreX, you—the hardware vendor—open up your management interface, so you only have to write 'policy' once, and from then on, everyone participating is plugged in. If everybody adopts this common framework, we'll all have interoperability at the management level—which is the most important place to have it," says Allen.
Allen conceded, however, that to develop a common set of APIs and tools that run everywhere, especially across multiple platforms, "the only way to do that, that I know of, is to use Java"—cross-platform software that is Sun's baby. Still, as he pointed out, "Java touches only the management interface—it doesn't impact the apps themselves."
The responsibility for making SANs work, he feels, is that of the vendors, who should recognize—as customers surely do—that "sole-suppliers don't have all the components anyway. Even in a multi-hosted, heterogeneous environment," he said, "somebody has to 'own' the data. We vendors need to supply the administrative tools that will simplify the management process—something that will also reduce the cost of storage management."
"You see, everything is proprietary today," he added. "If you want to deliver a storage service like remote mirroring, you need to mirror out of somebody's proprietary box. Wouldn't you rather have that storage service available to anything on your SAN? Wouldn't you want your services available to the whole network and not just to a single component from a single provider? Eventually, system vendors will deliver products that enable IT managers to do that, but the managers aren't focused on products—they want things like disaster recovery. They want solutions." |
