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

To: Gus who wrote (4420)	2/18/2002 9:13:40 PM
From: D. K. G.	Respond to of 4808

Auspex Pulls SANs Into NAS byteandswitch.com Auspex Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ASPX - message board) in April is planning to launch a NAS appliance that can tap into Fibre Channel-based SANs, one of the first multivendor SAN-to-NAS gateways to hit the market. Auspex's NSc3000 Network Storage Controller, which comes in a 5U-high, rack-mountable chassis, is being tested to work with SAN gear from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC - message board), Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ - message board), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE: LSI - message board). Auspex expects the NSc3000, which can manage up to 9 terabytes of SAN-attached storage, to have an average street price of $45,000. One of the main benefits of the NSc3000 is that it helps prevent vendor lock-in, says Bob Iacono, Auspex's VP of marketing. "We're looking to make sure people don't have to lock into a specific I/O subsystem," Iacono says. "We're saying, 'Folks, it's your decision as an administrator how you want to manage that data, and which hardware to put it on.' " Auspex outlined plans for the NSc3000, which acts as a gateway between IP networks and a SAN, in December when it announced its 3000-series family of NAS appliances (see Auspex Adds Appliances). Initially, the NSc3000 will use 1-Gbit/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters from JNI Corp. (Nasdaq: JNIC - message board); later this year, it will be available with 2-Gbit/s HBAs, Iacono says. He says Auspex is testing interoperability with FC switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD - message board), McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA - message board), and Vixel Corp. (Nasdaq: VIXL - message board). Auspex claims the unit has delivered up to 20,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) in performance testing. Systems similar to the Auspex NCs3000, such as EMC's Celerra HighRoad and Compaq's StorageWorks NAS Executor E7000, are able to bridge SAN and NAS environments as well. But Iacono notes that these are designed to work only with the SAN devices from those particular vendors. "It's fine if you're an EMC- or Compaq-only shop," he says. "But these vendors are trying to sell you more storage. Our idea is to promote interconnectivty between SANs and NAS." The new Auspex device will compete mainly with Veritas Software Corp.'s (Nasdaq: VRTS - message board) ServPoint NAS appliance software (see Veritas Has Virtual Déjà Vu). The ServPoint software runs on Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - message board) machines, and, Veritas says, it will soon be available for Intel-based servers. Essentially, it offers the same basic functionality as the Auspex NSc3000: file-based access to a multivendor SAN storage infrastructure. For now, says Iacono, the Veritas solution is more expensive than Auspex's because it requires Sun hardware. "We feel that, based on some of the testing we've done, you've got to go to 8-way Sun server to get the kind of performance the NSc3000 offers," he says. But whatever gap exists between Auspex's NAS/SAN gateway and others like it is likely to be closed in short order. Other NAS vendors are starting to broaden their SAN support, including IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM - message board). IBM says it's working with HDS to conduct interoperability testing of IBM's TotalStorage NAS 300G with the HDS Lightning 9900 series (see IBM Tests NAS With HDS). With more such NAS/SAN convergence developments due in the next few months, the Auspex NSc3000 may be one of the first devices of its kind -- but it doesn't have a huge head start. — Todd Spangler, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch byteandswitch.com