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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DownSouth who wrote (4346)	9/11/2000 12:34:30 PM
From: Greg Hull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

DS, Here's some more stuff for you and Id to munch on. Gus posted a critique of SoIP written by the Evaluator Group on the Fibre Channel thread. Here are a couple snips: "some people have a vision of having a single network for everything. Everything in this case includes storage, as well as the typical Ethernet functions as email, FTP of data, web access, device management over SNMP (even management of traditional non-data processing appliances), voice and video transmission, and all the other uses. These visionaries cite the usage of a single infrastructure, massive network bandwidth to be achieved in the future, and the ability to have storage anywhere in the world with the user (and even the administrator) not needing to know or worry about where..." "Congestion on IP networks leads to some very impacting consequences. Since the solution to congestion on Ethernet is to drop packets, the overhead will actually increase because it is up to the receiver to detect that a packet has not arrived and then to request it (over the same Ethernet) to be sent again. This creates significant network performance problems that are typically called meltdown. Storage devices have a significant problem if data does not arrive – especially in the case of a missing packet. In fibre channel, storage devices generally implement class 2 service, which means guaranteed delivery. The sequence checking and acknowledgement is handled in hardware so that data is guaranteed to be at the storage device or from the storage device without incurring additional network overhead." "Other solutions include: * Use the Virtual Interface Architecture instead of IP over Ethernet for storage access. This is targeted at greatly reducing the software overhead compared to IP but requires that the applications that exploit VI must change. Additionally, the storage system must implement VI. The change to applications may be a significant impediment for existing applications/customers but may be an opportunity for a new implementation." "Conclusion Storage can be done over IP and is being done today with NAS. There are improvements in performance being made with IP but improvements are also being made in fibre channel. In fibre channel, 2Gb/s is being deployed today and 10Gb/s is in development. The bottom line is that storage over IP is not for everyone and because of the security, integrity, and guaranteed performance concerns. Demanding environments will need direct or SAN attached storage. There will be coexistence of NAS devices and SANs and even linkage between the two for backup and storage backend for the NAS device in some cases. SCSI over IP is one of those performance improvement areas but does not solve all the problems and introduces others. This will be developed and made available at some time but will not delay the implementation of fibre channel based SANs. Companies that are not in the storage business that are trying to make an impact with SCSI over IP are trying to get a share of the market and be successful. Storage professionals will be very discerning when it comes to storage and solutions. The infrastructure implementation for fibre channel based SANs will continue and they will be resistive to make another change in the next 5 to 7 years." More of the report is available at Message 14358666 Greg