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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (2322)	10/8/2000 11:38:05 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

SAN Across the MAN -- SAN Valley uses IP as a storage technology to speed transmissions Chris Bucholtz While Fibre Channel establishes a beachhead within large corporate infrastructures, innovators are developing solutions to avoid using it for certain tasks. Although it plays a key role in enabling storage area networks (SANs), Fibre Channel's performance degrades when it's used to link sites over long distances. To get around that problem, SAN Valley Systems, Campbell, Calif., offers IP-to-SAN connectivity devices to extend the SAN infrastructure across metropolitan area networks (MANs), using corporate networks and the Internet. Rick Walsworth, SAN Valley vice president of marketing, spoke to Chris Bucholtz, VARBusiness senior editor/technology, about why storage over IP will become the secret weapon for building geographically dispersed storage pools. VB: Many companies are talking about using IP as a storage technology. What sets SAN Valley's approach apart from the competition? Walsworth: We're building a technology to interconnect SANs over IP networks, like a lot of people, but our products will sit on the edge of networks. They'll take links from storage switches, aggregate them across an IP link and distribute that data across an IP infrastructure. VB: Why can't this be done now using existing infrastructure? Walsworth: Well, today, if I run Fibre Channel across a MAN, I can traverse 10, 20 or 30,000 feet, but performance starts to suffer. If we map onto an IP framework, we can get around this without sacrificing availability and reliability. We're using Gigabit Ethernet to do this. VB: So you'll tie data from a data center or a LAN... Walsworth: Or both! VB: ...on a device that will then relay it over an IP network to other devices, which will then distribute data to the appropriate resources on the network? Walsworth: Right. VB: There are plenty of people trying to edge into this space. Walsworth: The ones you usually hear about are Nishan Systems and SanCastle, which are also focused on this space, but Cisco, Nortel, Lucent and others are making inroads. For us, that's a good news/bad news thing. Obviously, they're huge competitors, but they're also saying that they see this as a valid networking space. VB: Your devices are going to roll out this fall. Is there anything standing in the way of their widescale adoption? Walsworth: If there's anything, it's the question of interoperability among different storage-over-IP solutions. The goal is to allow all legacy networks to work together. What we need are standards. Today, there is no standard for storage across IP. If you wanted to interconnect our devices to Nishan Systems', you couldn't do it. The market will mature, and that's when the standard will happen. But we've heard from our solution providers that customers are not waiting-they want products as soon as possible. varbusiness.com Copyright ® 2000 CMP Media Inc.