Another take on HDS......
Vendors Bring Big-Time Storage To Small-Timers
(09/20/99, 7:04 p.m. ET)
By Joseph F. Kovar, Computer Reseller News
Hitachi Data Systems launched on Monday an entry-level storage array. This follows a similar launchby Data General, in Southboro, Mass., a week ago.
The new arrays reflect the trend of storage vendors to scale down enterprise-class storage to make it available to workgroups, and in the process, make it more attractive for VARs to sell such storage products, said Mike Kahn, president of The Clipper Group, in Wellesley, Mass.
Other vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems are providing similar entry-level storage, said Kahn.
"The trend in general is to provide departmental and remote storage solutions that offer enterprise functions," he said.
One of the few major vendors not offering such a product is EMC, Kahn said.
"Why does EMC have an interest in Data General? Because EMC has been only selling centralized storage," said Kahn. "Lots of it. EMC's theme has been centralized storage, centrally managed. But [the company] wants to get into distributed storage."
To succeed, storage vendors will need arrays of all different sizes, Kahn said. "Every vendor, even if it doesn't say so publicly, wants to be a part of this trend. And the products are coming in at a price point where VARs make sense. It's hard for vendors to have people everywhere," he said.
Hitachi's 5840 is an entry-level version of the company's 5800 series of arrays. It is scalable up to 10 hard-disk drives plus a spare, and offers a 512-megabyte cache, said Dick Search, the company's vice president of marketing. Up to six units can be mounted in a single rack for a capacity of up to 2 terabytes.
The 5840 supports both Fibre Channel and SCSI connectivity, and its TurboLUN feature allows certain files to be locked into the cache to give a 100 percent cache hit, said Search.
The 5840 is available to VARs through Wyle Systems, Tech Data, and Gates/Arrow Distributing, or can be purchased from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi directly.
The FC5300 Fibre Channel storage array from the Clariion Storage Division of Data General is scalable from three to 30 Fibre Channel hard-disk drives for a total capacity of up to 1 TB.
The unit is available immediately with list prices starting at about $20,000.
Tivoli/IBM roadmap......
Tivoli getting more responsibility in the SAN plan.....
Tivoli Makes Backups Play Nice With Networks
(09/20/99, 5:04 p.m. ET)
By Mitch Wagner , InternetWeek
IBM's Tivoli Systems unit said it plans next week to announce storage-management software designed to let IT managers managebandwidth on backup operations so the backups don't overwhelm network traffic.
Tivoli said it also plans to sketch out a road map for its Tivoli Storage Management suite for achieving storage interoperability between Unix, Windows NT, and other platforms, including a plan to deliver technology to let Unix and NT systems share files by early 2001.
Tivoli Storage Manager Version 3.7, to be available Sept. 28, lets IT managers set up policies that take into account the speed of a bandwidth connection and the amount of data to be backed up, and using those criteria set the granularity of data transfer -- whether data should be transferred by whole files, by blocks of data, or by bytes.
By setting the data transfer in large units, on high-speed connections such as Fibre Channel, IT managers can get the backup done quickly. By setting the software to upload only blocks or even individual bytes of data that have changed since the last backup, IT managers minimize the burden on network bandwidth, which is especially useful in low-speed connections such as dial-up, said Austin, Texas-based Tivoli.
The technology is used for backing up both servers and clients. The first update will be designed for mobile users on a dial-up connection; the technology will be available for any server or client on any speed connection by year's end. The technology will be available for handheld devices, including Nokia phones and Palm devices, in the first half of 2000.
The upgrade will allow systems to let multiple systems share tape drives.
Also, Tivoli will add support for dynamic multithreading, to let multiple servers back up simultaneously. Currently, IT managers looking to back up servers need to back up each server separately; dynamic multithreading will let IT managers start backup for all servers simultaneously, and the software will manage the procedure, backing up each server a little bit at a time in round-robin fashion. Dynamic multithreading can speed up backups by 150 percent to 170 percent, Tivoli said.
The new Rapid Recovery functionality is designed to let IT managers recover quickly from server crashes. It lets IT managers create CDs of the most recent backup of a system, which can then be loaded onto a server, preventing network bottlenecks that result when trying to download massive amounts of data to a new server.
For instance, transferring 1 gigabyte of data over a 10Base-T Ethernet can take a half hour to 45 minutes, while the same data can be loaded from CD-ROM in just six or seven minutes, Tivoli said.
All the storage software will be available for System 390 mainframes, common Unix flavors, Windows NT, Win 9x, Novell NetWare, and the Apple Macintosh.
Tivoli is looking in the fourth quarter to merge its storage-management interface with NetView, to give IT managers a one-screen view of the network.
ther out, Tivoli is looking to add to its software the ability to dynamically reallocate resources on a SAN from one system to another, without having to take the disks and servers offline first. That technology will be delivered in the second quarter of 2000.
o, Tivoli said it plans in the second quarter of next year to introduce serverless backup technology, to enable users to transfer data from one storage device to another without involving the network.
Finally, in 2001, Tivoli said it plans to introduce technology that will enable users of NT and Unix to share the same files, with locking mechanisms to prevent the files from being simultaneously written by two users. Tivoli said it expects to demonstrate the technology in the first quarter of next year.
IBM this summer shifted responsibility for its storage-management products, then named ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager, to the Tivoli business unit, to align storage management with other network management functions.
Don't see any evidence from this piece that IBM is pushing FC-SANs really hard.....any other opinions? Thanks in advance.
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