BillyG, Last yr. I used to write to DIVI asking them to consider moving into the Nascent FC-SAN biz. They never did, but maybe they really should have....In some ways it would have been an interesting fit....
From Aug. Upside Mag.............
upside.com
Hollywood's Tech Hit
Industry Update
August 27, 1999
by Dennis Eskow
Hollywood is worried about money. According to a recent Standard & Poor's survey, the average film today costs $70 million to make. Another $5 million goes into a movie's promotion and distribution. And converting a film into the darling of the new formats--digital video disk (DVD)--requires a seven-figure budget. So when a technology comes along that can compress production time and keep production systems from crashing, Hollywood is among the first to adopt it.
Tinseltown's latest technology hit is storage area networks (SANs), a nascent category that is giving old-line storage companies like EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., and Seagate Technology Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif., a new life--and creating opportunities for relative newcomers like fiber-switch makers Gadzoox Networks Inc. and Brocade Communications Systems Inc., both of San Jose.
"We upgrade systems every six months," says Don Ecklund, VP of engineering for Sony Pictures Entertainment, a division of Sony Corp. that has produced more than 200 DVDs in its California studios. "So when we learned about storage area networks and what they can do, we moved right in and adopted them." The result, he says, was deep cuts in the time it takes to make a DVD and, thus, cuts in production costs.
What is a SAN? A SAN is a networking strategy that isolates stored information from the rest of the network. In a SAN, the storage devices connect to the server independently, providing a dedicated path to the data center. And that path is built on a high-speed transmission technology called a Fibre Channel.
In the real world outside Hollywood, not every company will be able to immediately capitalize on the cost-saving benefits of SANs as Sony did. Vendors are still working out compatibility issues among SAN solution parts, and open standards between vendors are a way off. But as the always-on Internet pushes companies' data stores to bursting, an enterprise storage architecture that makes data easier to maintain and continuously available is increasingly attractive.
Focusing the market
Dominated at present by mainframe-based systems, the SAN market was worth $2 billion in 1999, according to Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts Inc., a Santa Barbara, Calif., market consulting firm specializing in storage and storage management. About 85 percent of the market is for storage hardware, Neema says. Another 13 percent is software and the remaining 2 percent is switches, a relatively new and hot category of storage product needed to run a SAN.
Drilling down, the total SAN hardware market, which includes storage systems and Fibre Channel hubs and switches, is expected to reach $11.4 billion by 2002, according to January 1999 statistics from International Data Corp. (IDC), Framingham, Mass. (See "Worldwide SAN hardware market," left.) "The demand for SANs is not being pushed by vendors, but it is being pulled by customers who have to deal with unpredictable traffic streams tying up their networks," says analyst Emmy Johnson of Cahners In-Stat Group, Newton, Mass. "Especially on the Web, with its 24-hour service model, organizations want to be sure that Internet connections will be available at all times."
In some ways, SANs are as old as the hills. Before there were SANs there was Escon, for enterprise systems connections, the mainframe storage technology developed in the 1980s by IBM Corp. As with SANs, Escon sped up storage and made it more reliable. It also allowed users to split the application from the storage, where both used to sit on a single application server. Banks, stock exchanges and financial clearinghouses seized on the new technology and turned it into a multibillion-dollar industry almost overnight.
The secret to Escon was fiber-attached storage (FAS) devices. With copper attachments, the storage device always had to be located a few feet from the server. But when fiber optics arrived, corporations could locate the storage far from the server, even in another building. IBM, Hitachi Data Systems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., EMC and a slew of small companies quickly optimized their mainframe systems with software that allowed system architects to set up storage devices on "farms."
In today's distributed computing model, corporations have vital information on servers all over the place. So the servers of a pharmaceutical company might be located in the headquarters building for accounting and inventory, in the research labs for connections to subcontractors and in a remote customer-service center halfway across the country. Fiber attachments between the local storage devices and a local server can easily be set up with simple FAS systems. But some of the buildings located at great distances need a communications switch to get into the network. Also, managing the data requires sophisticated software that can find the fastest path between servers or move the load off an overloaded storage device and place it on another. Enter SANs.
Players to watch
The leading vendors in the SAN market include those that sell complete SAN solutions (EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Compaq Computer Corp. and Hitachi Data Systems); and makers of fiber opticðconnected storage devices (Seagate and Storage Technology Corp., Louisville, Colo.), SAN switches (Brocade and Gadzoox) and software (Legato Systems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., and Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif.).
Some traditional storage hardware vendors are moving into the SAN arena through acquisition. Storage Technology Corp., or StorageTek, for instance, acquired Network Systems Corp. of Minneapolis, a vendor of high-performance internetworking products, to build both FAS and SAN systems. "Our most important strategy is to be open," says StorageTek's chief strategist, Walt Tinton. "We currently operate with Compaq, Dell [Computer Corp.], Sun [Microsystems Inc.], IBM RS/6000 and other [hardware] systems. We count the big enterprise vendors--IBM, Sun, HP and EMC--as our key competitors."
Openness is a key theme for customers as well. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which serves data to 30,000 libraries, has networked 20 Windows NT Servers with a system that includes IBM, Tandem and other hardware. "The StorageTek [SAN] solution lets Sun and NT servers share the same storage," says Jerry Lynch, director of OCLC's operations division. "We want to put the whole data center on a single SAN eventually."
Openness is a key theme for customers as well. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which serves data to 30,000 libraries, has networked 20 Windows NT Servers with a system that includes IBM, Tandem and other hardware. "The StorageTek [SAN] solution lets Sun and NT servers share the same storage," says Jerry Lynch, director of OCLC's operations division. "We want to put the whole data center on a single SAN eventually."
page 3: Will Vendors Open Up?
Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to buy an all-in-one SAN solution that's totally open. "Those looking for whole enterprise solutions are probably looking at EMC, but [it] provides a proprietary solution--not everything works with [its] SAN," says Richard Scocozza, technology analyst with Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York.
For that reason, the companies to watch in the SAN space are those that market the SAN system components, not the storage device makers, according to Scocozza. "The market for switches and software is going to grow at a healthy rate in the next two to three years," Scocozza says. "This year, that market is south of $50 million. But the people who make the SAN hardware are going to be bigger customers now that the market is taking off."
Veritas and Legato, for instance, develop software that manages SANs and optimizes them for greater performance, more system uptime and increased security. Gadzoox and Brocade were among the first makers of fiber-connected switches designed especially for SANs. Combined with storage hardware, these switches form systems that almost never crash.
For a company like the Internet Travel Network (ITN) of Palo Alto, Calif., which does thousands of transactions an hour for people making travel connections and hotel reservations online, that's a crucial selling point. "Our goal is to have zero planned and unplanned outages," says Al Whaley, ITN's chief technology officer. Some of his large-scale systems use storage from mainframe vendor EMC. But for his NT boxes, Whaley feels he may have to wait for complete SAN solutions. Not everything runs the way it's supposed to run on today's bleeding-edge SANs.
"Oracle [Corp. database] replication is not really integrated into the SAN technology," Whaley says, adding that Oracle data stored on the SANs he has tested doesn't always replicate properly, meaning the data being used by one department may not match the data being used by another. "The vendors are working on it, but this is still relatively young technology."
Will vendors open up?
While each vendor whacks away at the compatibility issues for its own SAN products, two industry groups are racing to come up with a single standard for interoperability. But experts like IDC's John McArthur say the battle between the Storage Networking Industry Association and the Fibre Alliance will not produce standards in the near future. "Neither group is an official standards body," McArthur notes. "Standards are a beautiful thing when you want everything to work together well. But standards don't help with time-to-market. So companies build a de facto standard and try to force the issue."
Hollywood's Tech Hit
page 4: DVD Production Values
The SAN technology is so young that few analysts will bet on any vendor's standard. But once SAN compatibility issues are settled, whol new storage-over-the-Internet services can take off. Providers of virtual storage via the Web, like StoragePoint Inc. of San Diego, are beginning to move up the food chain from small companies to larger enterprises. "We have a few contracts with corporate clients," says Chairman and CEO Scott Zimmerman. "This industry will be a good customer of SAN technology when it is a completely open technology."
An in-demand technology that provides cost benefits and is based on open standards? Sounds like a sugarcoated script more suited to Hollywood than the computing industry. Stay tuned.
DVD Production Values
The making of a digital video disk (DVD) involves editing, mixing, encoding and remixing all the data in a movie--and then some. In the days before storage area networks (SANs), a film DVD could take weeks or months to make. That's because the multistep process was done on separate workstations and then shipped back and forth between departments as various pieces were finished.
But in the post-SAN era, the process takes days. The 1998 "Mask of Zorro" remake starring Antonio Banderas was one of the first film projects for which Sony used its new DVD production system powered by a SAN storage array from Storage Computer Corp., Nashua, N.H. The setup allowed various production workers to do their jobs at the same time, swapping data back and forth and using the SAN to deliver data-rich visual images at high speeds.
Before a DVD project starts, the film first goes to the Sony High-Definition Center where it is transferred to digital tape. Sony VP of Engineering Don Ecklund says all film is now converted to a
digital tape format to make it readily transferable to any medium. Meanwhile, in the client studio, additional DVD segments are created, including interviews with the stars, video games related to the movie and trivia questions.
Each DVD includes a menu with the time and location of each segment to help users skip to a favorite item. In the past, creating a menu was a lengthy process that forced the production crew to return frequently to the original HDTV print. With the SAN element, they access the menu items from a local disk and the film elements from the digital storage device, which is accessible to all the production departments at once.
Six video compression stations also reside on the network, constantly sending MPEG-2 video contents to redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) boxes with a total storage capacity of just over 800 gigabytes. These are constantly archived at sub-100-millisecond speed, faster by half than pre-SAN networks.
So project engineers, audio and video compression technicians, subtitle makers (for foreign language segments) and others can access the master version of the movie and all the other contents repeatedly and virtually at the same time. And, eventually, Sony can get a DVD version of a swashbuckler onto store shelves quicker.
Dennis Eskow covers vertical markets for market research firm Cahners In-Stat Group in Newton, Mass.
There are threads that follow this evolving industry on SI..
many of the companies are now too expensive to buy- both for us and for DIVI. |
