JFieb,
I wonder if McData is positioning itself for an IPO or a sale to someone that doesn't have 64-port and 128-port switches.
Here is an excellent layman's terms article on interoperability that I haven't seen posted.
techweb.com
February 21, 2000, Issue: 774
Section: Infrastructure
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Flexible SANs: The Storage Solution Of The Future -- But A Lack Of Interoperability Has Some Companies Hesitant To Implement Them
Sam Dickey
Storage area networks-with the promise of server-independent, scalable, centralized storage-could solve a lot of problems for many companies, yet customers remain cautious. There are bold exceptions; indeed, 96% of respondents to an InformationWeek Research survey of 600 IT and business managers say their companies plan to deploy a network storage product in 2000, either throughout their companies, within specific departments, or as pilot projects.
But as they move forward, many IT and business managers are hesitant, wanting assurances that a complete solution is available, or they're choosing a slower-paced, phased-in approach to implementation. "In the future, we will go so far as to insist that we see interoperability," says Greg Cherry, technical systems leader at Acxiom Corp., a Little Rock, Ark., provider of information-management products that use consumer and business data.
Storage vendors and the makers of the host bus adapters, switches, and hubs necessary for networking have made progress in the past year in product interoperability-a key element of the SAN concept, in which servers running different operating systems connect to distinct brands of switches linked to a variety of storage subsystems. Most of the leaders-Compaq, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and Storage Technology-have set up interoperability labs to test the configurations they support.
True interoperability, however, isn't complete. "What I would consider interoperability is not a reality yet," says Sean Derrington, program director at Meta Group, an IT consulting firm.
Today, many vendors' SAN systems interface with servers running a variety of operating systems. The delay is on the storage side, in support for multiple types of storage devices. The storage-system vendors haven't disclosed specific dates when they will offer solutions that work with storage systems other than their own.
There has been progress, and-though no one can say when-standards for easy interoperability should emerge as a result of work being done by consortia such as the Storage Networking Industry Association and as vendors recognize a common benefit in compatibility among their product offerings. Meanwhile, interoperability is at the heart of a vigorous industry debate over open vs. closed systems, which only further complicates matters for customers.
The question of open vs. closed systems is a concern to some customers considering SAN implementation. To them, there is a principle involved: Although having a single vendor responsible for a complete solution will be attractive to early adopters, those customers eventually will want to integrate with other technology and standards. Also, a single vendor is unlikely to have all the best products all the time, and for companies to acquire products cost effectively, they need alternatives.
While sympathetic to the idea of open systems, some customers can't afford to wait for standards. "My heart goes out to the concept of open systems," says EMC customer Charlie Walden, executive VP of technology at E-mail services provider Mail.com Inc. in New York. "But if I'm dealing with a critical issue, the last thing in the world I want is to pull together multiple vendors and have them talk about something happening over a SAN. The fewer the vendors, the easier our job is."
The open-vs.-proprietary debate involves other vendors criticizing market-leader EMC for including only EMC storage in its SAN solutions, thus keeping its systems closed, while other vendors are working on what they promise will be open systems. In fact, even though EMC is moving ahead with its own products, the company is also working toward standards with Fibre Alliance, another industry group. "Ask the other vendors to show you an installation where they support EMC and their own storage with the same management software," says Roger Cox, chief analyst at Gartner Group. "That's not being done today."
Industry standards are evolutionary and are being defined as work progresses. "It's always the case that if you develop a proprietary solution, you have the ability to move more quickly," says Kevin Reardon, director of strategy, technology group, at IBM, a major storage-system provider. "You don't have to negotiate with other vendors as to what is the best solution. And there are people who would argue that you come up with a better solution. But we have found that for customers, the better answer is open. It gives them more options over the longer term."
Jim Rothnie, EMC's senior VP and chief marketing technical officer, says the vendor's first priority is to ensure that Symmetrix, the storage component of EMC's Enterprise Storage Network solution, heterogeneous network components, and network servers work together. "However, if customers wish to attach other vendors' disk and tape storage devices to ESN, EMC will work closely with switch and hub vendors to prioritize, test, and qualify other storage devices to interoperate within the Enterprise Storage Network," Rothnie says. "Several are already being tested. EMC is completing testing of disk arrays from Clariion, which EMC acquired when it purchased hardware vendor Data General Corp. last year. Others will be done based on customer demand and the availability of Fibre Channel-switched, fabric-ready disk arrays from other vendors."
Certainly, the need for SANs is there. Companies involved in Internet commerce generate data at an explosive rate, and analyzation methods such as data mining make data valuable assets that demand a lot of capacity. The data deluge means regularly adding more storage via directly connected storage devices, plus the loss of network performance when data backup and recovery is done over the application network and some systems must be shut down. True interoperability would resolve the problem.
Storage area networks offer centrally managed pools of storage, consolidated logically or physically, that can be allocated among multiple servers and scaled up as needs require. Fibre Channel connections in a SAN allow greater distance between a server and a storage device-typically up to nearly four miles, and about 20 miles with extenders, compared with about 80 feet with SCSI, allowing the use of a SAN to connect several buildings across a business campus. Longer distances will require a wide area network technology such as asynchronous transfer mode.
Whether or not industry standards exist, some companies can't wait for them. The early adopters of SANs are taking advantage of the technology- even if it's not fully available and they are, in effect, standardizing themselves by limiting storage devices to those available from a specific SAN solution vendor.
"When you look at the amount of storage that can reside behind the Fibre Channel infrastructure in a SAN, I think the cost is considerably less than a traditional SCSI implementation," says Cherry, the technical systems leader at Acxiom. "Now, I can manage a lot more storage from a central point. This gives me economies of scale in terms of my managed costs, as opposed to just physical cost."
Acxiom began deploying Compaq's StorageWorks SAN technology last fall. A SAN offers Acxiom the flexibility to reallocate 50 terabytes of storage as customer needs change. At Acxiom, with more than 200 Compaq, IBM, and Sun Microsystems servers running Windows NT and Unix situated in a single building, the storage isn't dedicated to specific servers. "Having a SAN in place would make storage available in an on-demand basis to handle peak loads and to handle special projects, such as data mining, for our customers, particularly in our outsourcing relationships," Cherry says.
To Mail.com, an E-mail provider for business clients and outsourced E-mail services for Internet service providers, the attraction of storage area networks is in centralizing storage management. In August, Mail.com implemented EMC's ESN system, connecting 100 Sun 450, 4000, and 6000 servers in a single building via Fibre Channel to 27 terabytes of centralized Symmetrix storage.
The primary application at Mail.com is E-mail, although billing functions also run on the servers. "At one point, we were managing data all over the network," Walden says. Since the SAN lets users consolidate storage either physically or logically, storage can be managed centrally and disks can be reconfigured on the fly, rather than reconfiguring disks in separate servers. A storage area network offers Mail.com higher data availability and requires fewer workers to manage it.
When implementing a new technology, Walden says, he felt comfortable choosing a relatively mature solution. "We're an Internet company, so maybe we're a little more ready to take risks, but I didn't feel like being on the bleeding edge," he says. "We felt confident that EMC could deliver a solution, so we took the leap."
Another Internet company, Elcom.com Inc., a hosted E-procurement service in Boston, implemented HP's SureStore XP256 enterprise storage product last fall. The device houses 1.5 terabytes of Elcom.com's data and will scale up to 18 terabytes. The advantage to Elcom.com is in data and server consolidation. "It allows us to have our data sitting on one box," CIO Danny Gurizzan says. "That's important to me. All the servers will go to one location, be they HP-UX, NT, or whatever, and reside there, allowing me to mine data, migrate data, and back up data." Elcom.com's servers are 40 feet from the storage device.
An HP shop, Elcom.com should reduce the number of its servers to 12 by the end of March, Gurizzan says. That would avoid an estimated $1 million in hardware and support costs during the next 12 months. In addition, the storage area network will require fewer workers to manage it and will occupy less space. "I'm going to be able to handle three or four times my current workload with just the 12 servers," he says. "It's expandable within the same footprint, and additional equipment can be installed without bringing the system down. Knowing we have a high-availability network with little chance of failure will increase our customers' comfort level."
The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is watching storage area network development closely, but it's taking a cautious approach. The university is migrating its human-resources and student-administration systems from legacy systems to a PeopleSoft Inc. application on a Sun E10000 server directly connected via Fibre Channel to a Sun A5200 subsystem with 8 terabytes of storage.
Although the university doesn't have a switched SAN fabric, and thus by definition doesn't have a SAN, the Fibre interface between one server and storage device serves to prepare them for a phased approach to a SAN.
The university's immediate problem is backup for its other systems. "Our backup processes now are standard network-based," says Pete Bartz, manager of enterprise computing services. "We know, based on our growth, that we will need something that's not network-based, or else when we get big enough we'll have a management nightmare. We're using today's technology to position ourselves for a SAN implementation and learning along the way." In six to eight months the university expects to implement a storage area network, even if it's limited to backup.
Looking beyond the backup problem, the ability to consolidate and manage storage logically is attractive to Bartz. "Our environment requires fairly quick growth in any one of several pockets of storage-production, testing, development, or data warehouse, for example. We may have some to spare storage in one area. We may be short in another. If we can go to a common network fabric to manage our storage, then all the resources become a pool that's assignable to individual systems without having to make a lot of physical changes. It makes it a lot easier to move resources around," he says.
At Acxiom, Cherry says he is working only with Compaq storage on Compaq servers, but would like to have the flexibility that open systems afford. "It's going to be pressure from customers like us who say, 'Unless you can show me demonstrated interoperability in your labs with, for example, [Compaq] StorageWorks and EMC [Symmetrix] interoperating and managed from a single point, then you don't meet my criteria for a qualified vendor,'" Cherry says.
As the market matures, he predicts, all vendors will gradually remove barriers to interoperability. Those who worry about losing control of an early market share will discover they have more to lose by being perceived as closed, especially if new products prove equally reliable. "We already see storage vendors such as Compaq and EMC in discussions with other vendors, and they have begun incorporating some other vendors' products, like Brocade Communications Systems switches in their solutions," Cherry says.
In the view of University of Minnesota's Bartz, open systems are ultimately the better choice because they will last longer, receive better support, and work in a distributed environment. "My problem is I have a lot of data, it's growing by leaps and bounds, and my window for backup keeps shrinking," Bartz says. "I can't afford a solution that's not for the long term. It can't be a proprietary solution that, when open standards appear, may become obsolete. I'll try to implement the broadest platform with the broadest infrastructure underneath it that I can. But your infrastructure is secondary to the problem you have, and I can't be pigeonholed."
The sniping among vendors represents their anxieties that rivals will use the uncertainty surrounding a new technology to lock customers into a particular platform or product. In the short term, vendors will offer a complete solution as one way to bypass the interoperability problem and gain customer confidence. However, Scott MacIntyre, business line manager for storage networking at software developer Legato Systems Inc., says this isn't a viable option for anyone in the long term. "We all have a common vision of open, interoperating storage networks that include all vendors, big and small," he says. "We all understand that's where we have to get to. Criticism gets thrown at EMC now, but it gets thrown at the others as well."
Eric Herzog, VP of marketing at redundant arrays of independent disks controller vendor Mylex Corp., compares Fibre Channel storage area networks to the early development stages of SCSI, when there were also interoperability problems. He says he expects the problems to be solved more rapidly this time, however. "The guys doing Fibre Channel are the guys who did SCSI," Herzog says. "They learned their lesson once. Last year, I would have told you nothing works with anything. But interoperability is progressing well."
While they may never be totally heterogeneous, the benefits of networked storage make SANs the storage technology of the future. In a rapidly changing business world in which it has become impossible to purchase storage in quantities that will cover all contingencies, centralized, consolidated storage that can be shared, scaled, and redeployed according to need offers IT organizations a flexible solution. In addition, it reduces the operational impact that Unix and Windows NT servers are placing on IT. With skilled workers already scarce and hard to retain, networked storage promises to lower a company's management costs.
For the time being, vendors are working together through industry consortia to make interoperability a reality. In the meantime, customers don't need to sit on their hands. There's no reason for even the most cautious companies not to begin laying the groundwork for storage area networks now, by introducing Fibre Channel into their environments, for instance, and learning what they can about the technology by tracking vendors' involvement with standards bodies and asking questions.
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