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To: Mehitabel who wrote (7683)	9/17/1999 10:14:00 AM
From: bob gauthier	Respond to of 17183

Sun Storage Directions: Sun Microsystems Inc will begin overhauling its mish mash of disk arrays with a modular storage architecture from its January acquisition of Maxstrat Corp when it sends a mid-to-high end product out on early release next month. Sun hopes to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for storage as companies move increasing amounts of commercial data online. The Maxstrat 'brick' architecture, code-named Noble and referred to as a network storage 'appliance' will serve as a building block for new arrays that will be "moved into the Sun world as the cornerstone of Sun's storage strategy" the company told ComputerWire. "It will replace Sun's entire storage line," Sun said. Sun says that storage now accounts for 22 cents of every dollar of revenue. It says reports suggesting storage accounts for more than 50% of a system sale are wrong, although the value of the storage component is increasing quickly. The Noble technology, three years in the making, has been in beta for six months and will be generally available in the first quarter of next year. Sun bought Maxstrat specifically for Noble, which it will productize as member of its StorEdge product line. The initial footprint of the system is designed for data warehousing, high performance computing and ISP markets. The company claims it will offer the highest throughput performance on the market. To create Noble, Maxstrat stripped out key technologies from its high-end Gen5-S storage servers and implemented them on a 3U rack unit with controllers that enable it to be used for a range of application environments. An entry-level Fibre Channel system with 18Gb drives is 144Gb. It's targeted at users that need 100Gb or more capacity, said to be the sweet spot of Sun's storage market. The Gen5-S product line is optimized for the high- capacity, high-performance SCSI, Fibre Channel and HIPPI markets and is used in some top tier supercomputer accounts. Sun says the Maxstrat 'brick' will simplify storage, enabling customers easily add capacity as required. It will not be touted as a point solution because the Noble includes Maxstrat's application personality tuning (APT) software. Sun says this enables a user "to take the same box, turn the dials and it becomes an NFS server or HPC box or OLTP system." The company says it will produce other versions of Noble for smaller capacity requirements including general purpose database hosting. The 'brick' is just one part of Sun's long-term storage strategy, which has three guiding principles. One is a belief that companies will move from proprietary to 'open' solutions, including use of its forthcoming Jiro APIs for writing cross- platform storage management APIs in Java. Second is that discrete 'box' services will be replaced by services distributed on a network, including storage area networks. Third is that modular storage subsystem technologies like Noble will replace monolithic designs. Sun is already moving programs hosted on the encore server over to Solaris, which will enable them to be used in conjunction with the Maxstrat array and other storage subsystems. They include SnapShot, which Sun says is the equivalent of EMC Corp's Instant Image, and Remote Data Copy, which acts like PowerPath. Sun claims its A3500 and A5000 RAID arrays won't be replaced until the second quarter of 2001. They will be upgraded next month with Fibre Channel controllers to the front-end. Sun doesn't do Fibre Channel all the way to disk. Sun claims it is the biggest supplier of Unix-based storage, having sold 3 petabytes on its A5000 StorEdge arrays alone. The number two player is EMC Corp. However what Sun covets is the market for 'open' storage systems that can be used in conjunction with different operating systems, including Windows NT. Sun says this is the fastest growing piece of its storage business. In this market Sun claims to be the number two supplier behind Compaq Computer Corp but ahead of IBM Corp and EMC. Encroachment into NT markets is leading the charge, Sun claims. Sun claims to be shifting 12Tb of storage a day. However, a survey it recently carried amongst its users suggest only 8% are implementing storage area networks (SANs) now, while 10% are planning to develop SANs in the next 12 to 18 months. Real implementation will begin in 2002/2003 Sun estimates. Sun believes network attached storage is useful in some environments and will leverage the Maxstrat brick to encourage the development of private NAS loops to which a limited number of devices can be attached. Software drivers will eventually enable Fibre Channel fabrics to support a theoretical 16 million nodes, up from just 127 now. Toothpaste giant Colgate uses Sun storage to host its 1.2Tb SAP database, claimed to be the biggest R/3 production database in the world. Colgate says it will turn off the lights of its last outsourced mainframe at the end of the year. The clutch of supporting RS/6000s will bite the dust too. Colgate says it wants network storage not clustered storage, which requires systems to be disconnected, reconnected and rebooted when capacity is added or take offline. It has a 15-minute data copy delay across the organization to help prevent user disasters, the most likely source of data loss. Employees have 15 minutes to recover data after making errors before the new data status is copied across the organization. Colgate had 2Tb storage in 1996. It has 18Tb now and claims to provide 99.8% uptime to its users. Steven Bulmer, director of technology at $100m IT services and technology supplier Allied Group Inc believes it unlikely that discrete storage entities are unlikely to be replaced by common storage management services for another four or five years. While the storage market lumbers towards 100Mbps Fibre Channel delivery there are still challenges, Bulmer says. The 126 device limit per FC loop must be overcome along with fault isolation in switched environments, the ability to add national or international storage networks is still beyond the limits of FC and out-of-band applications must be developed to oversee multi-vendor storage networks, while vendor incompatibility remains problematic for the development of the industry as a whole. Bulmer advises building small FC storage loops and warns against booting directly off a storage area network.

To: Mehitabel who wrote (7683)	9/17/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: bob gauthier	Respond to of 17183

DG News Clariion, the storage division of Data General Corp, is extending its end-to-end Fibre Channel approach with its FC5300 disk array aimed at the SME market. Joel Schwarz, senior vice president and general manager of the Southborough, Massachusetts-based company said that the new product is also suitable for organizations such as banks that want storage in branch offices to be entirely compatible with what they have at head office. The FC5300 is pitched at an aggressively low price point of 18 cents per megabyte, a feat which was achieved by stripping out all but the bare essentials of Clariion's larger offerings, placing it well to compete against offerings from Compaq and low-end Storage Networks, Schwarz argues. It costs just over half the price of the next machine up in the Clariion range, the 5700, and also has the advantage of being easily upgradable as the user site's requirements increase. "It has the same enclosures and disks," Schwarz explained. The list price of the smallest 5300 array is about $20,000, with a 30-drive, high-end version retailing about $200,000.

To: Mehitabel who wrote (7683)	9/17/1999 10:32:00 AM
From: bob gauthier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

More on Sun storage directions. Sun Microsystems Inc says it's not so much replacing its storage line with the modular 'brick' technology from Maxstrat Corp as introducing a product that users will be able scale to serve all of their storage requirements. "It's like an operating system to which you can add functionality," Janpieter Scheerder president of Sun's Network Storage division told ComputerWire, "and like some users will be happy to stay with the Solaris 7 operating system, others will want to move on to new versions as they are released." Scheerder points to EMC Corp's 'big box' strategy of packing rows and rows of disks and controllers in one unit, suggesting it allows users little leeway to add, adapt or change storage capacity as required. Boxed services, says Sun, are "fixed function, closed architectures, tied to the box and offer no way to innovate." Even Data General Corp's Clariion storage systems are "still disks behind a server," it says. Scheerder, who has been reinventing Sun's storage strategy on the back of Maxstrat, says the key thing that Sun has learned is that there is no perfect product. Things will always go wrong. However the skill set it has on tap with the Maxstrat team offers a radically different approach to problem solving than the traditional systems market which is obsessed with creating standalone products that never break down. The Maxtrat-informed approach that Scheerder favors will be implicit in the new StorEdge product lines going forward, drawing on the telecom industry's network principles. When something on a telco network goes wrong, a router, switch or circuit malfunctions, engineers will typically not try to fix the offending device. Instead they will use the network to work around and isolate the offending part and then take it out. Moreover, it is these skills and the ability to make Sun's collection of storage software work across storage networks that is Scheerder's value proposition. The modular storage 'brick' itself is less important, although there are important algorithms and patents it has acquired with Maxstrat which will enable Sun to implement this vision. Unlike IBM Corp and other storage vendors, Scheerder believes that storage technology itself is not rocket science. What's key is understanding the changing storage requirements which need to be met. The majority of data, Scheerder believes, is not text but made up by more bulky voice, graphics and other multimedia files. Just look on your own desktop, he says. This means the equations that define the relationship between the compute performance necessary to process an organization's data are changing radically. Operating a network of modular, scalable storage devices enables users to keep pace with these changing demands and workloads, Scheerder claims. Scheerder is at pains to distinguish storage area networks (SAN) from traditional network environments such as LANs, which have nothing to do with SANs. Deploying storage on a SANs is analogous to the way systems can be clustered together to form a larger 'virtual' processing resource. Point products such as storage appliances created for use in specific application environments such as filing, caching and other tasks are "short term" solutions according to Scheerder. As a user's storage requirements grow, these ring-fenced solutions will be terribly difficult to upgrade or migrate from, he believes. Scheerder says he honestly does not know what percentage of a system sale price is storage. Sun says storage accounts for 22 cents of every dollar of revenue. Some estimates suggest storage spending could be more than 50% of the costs of a system sale in some cases. Scheereder says that whatever actual figure "spending on storage is much more than people think," he says.