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To: DownSouth who wrote (15977)	1/22/2000 10:15:00 PM
From: Greg Hull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Here is an interesting article on NAS and SAN that Joe Wagner posted on the Ancor thread: E-business Hands Storage Industry a License to Print Money 212.134.35.5 Excerpts: "A succession of industry research reports suggest the market for data storage products will rival the market for computer systems in value over the next few years on the back of a compound annual growth rate of 60%." "In the world of high-speed, secure, 24x7 commercial data availability, there are really two alternative storage choices emerging in addition to conventional server/storage combinations. Suppliers of storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) equipment and software each claim they are best placed to service the storage requirements of e-business. Both push intelligence out into the network and use a similar approach of separating the data from the application server itself, which enables data to be managed centrally, storage capacity to be upgraded independently from the server, and data fault-resilience to be built into the system if a server goes down. SAN and NAS, which both, are together expected to account for half of the storage market by 2005 with traditional storage networks accounting for the remainder. Market researcher IDC estimates the NAS market will be worth $5.1bn by 2003, up from $540m last year." "Legato says 20% of its business - it did $71.7m last quarter - is now driven directly by companies re-centralizing their storage systems from point-product solutions. It thinks NAS and SANs will be ultimately complimentary not directly competitive. NAS solutions are being built out using TCP/IP over gigabit Ethernet networks which makes them inherently less expensive that SANs, which use faster block-level protocols including SCSI over more expensive Fibre Channel infrastructure." "Network Appliance ... [expects] the distinction between NAS and SANs will blur over time, driven it says by suppliers - including itself - who will develop fabric (network) equipment and devices which can support both kinds of tasks." "The company isn't eschewing Fibre Channel SANs entirely, indeed NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven has said that in reality the industry is "not about network NAS versus SANs, it's NAS plus SAN." NetApp is working with switch vendors to allow customers to reconfigure Fibre Channel networks on the fly to use its filer systems." "Additionally NetApp points to the server industry's attempt to define a new channel-based, switched fabric architecture input/output mechanism through the InfiniBand initiative (a convergence of earlier competing Next Generation I/O and Future I/O specifications) as essential to driving convergence in the storage market because it will enable the same devices to support Unix, NT and other operating system environments. The architecture bypasses the underlying operating system and connects the CPU and memory directly to an I/O engine. In any case it suggests perhaps three years from now something other than TCP/IP may be running across Gigabit Ethernet networks; if anyone comes up with an asynchronous blocking protocol for it that is." "EMC has its feet planted firmly in the high-end commercial market where Fibre Channel SANs are expected to predominate but it also believes there will be a significant revenue opportunity for NAS products that is not to be sniffed at. Its executives refer to the NAS versus SAN battle as a "phony war." EMC's view is that NAS devices are particularly useful for certain dedicated functions, such as file serving and sharing, but are little suited to quickly shifting huge amounts of data as required by online transaction processing applications." "EMC's expected to supercede its first-generation NAS device with technology from its recent acquisition of Data General Corp." "Nevertheless it's difficult to see how SAN and NAS storage equipment and software suppliers can go wrong, given e-business is still in its infancy." Greg