Article from Internet Week.
-Jay
_________
January 05, 1998, Issue: 696
Section: Clients & Servers
Storage Technologies Have Impact On The Bottom Line
Amy Rogers and Chuck Moozakis
If 1997 was like a hot red Ferrari for data storage and clustering, 1998 will be
more like your aunt's Chevrolet coupe-not very flashy, but slow and steady. For
the most part, industry watchers say 1998 will build on the momentum created in
the last half of 1997.
"I believe '97 was the revolutionary year," said Farid Neema, president of
Peripheral Concepts Inc., a storage market research firm. "Now we will see these
technologies deployed in 1998."
Indeed, storage technologies such as Fibre Channel, network-attached storage and
storage area networks will gain footholds in 1998, driven by corporate mandates
to more efficiently manage enterprise data.
Treating data storage as a strategic asset-instead of as a necessary evil-may be
one of this year's most intriguing developments, said Anders Lofgren, an analyst
at the Giga Information Group. "Managers are seeing that data and storage have a
bottom-line impact."
That said, here are some trends to watch in 1998:
- Fibre Channel will be one of the leading hardware developments in 1998 (see
related story, page 45). Fibre will drive the development of new storage designs,
such as storage area networks, and allow companies to connect storage
repositories at distances up to 10 kilometers and at speeds up to 100 megabytes
per second. As the prices of Fibre switches and hubs continue to drop, more
sophisticated Fibre switched fabrics also will make an impact.
- The storage devices rolling out this year will be more intelligent. "Companies are
now realizing they are spending a lot of money on storage," said Neema. "They
want storage systems that offer a total solution, that have backup and storage
management capabilities."
Intelligent storage also tops the list of trends predicted by Bill Pinkerton, IBM's
worldwide marketing manager for open systems storage. "I characterize
software-driven storage as a cut above intelligent controllers. We're talking about
high-level software and development tools with very sophisticated functionality,
as opposed to just RAID and failover."
- More enterprises will choose Windows NT as their networking software. When
this happens, the demands for high availability and scalability will increase
correspondingly. "You'll see greater capacity of NT storage devices," said Tom
Lahive, a storage analyst at Dataquest Inc. "Unix will grow, but at the low end,
NT will replace it."
NT 5.0's built-in storage management controls won't have much impact in 1998,
Lahive said, mostly because its release isn't expected until late in the year, if then.
"Users know they can't count on it, so they've engineered around it."
- The deployment of intranets and extranets throughout companies will mean even
greater demands on system performance. "Your network has to be accessible, the
information has to be accessible. The software piece of this will be absolutely
critical," said Doug Fierro, EMC Corp.'s manager of marketing programs.
Clustering Flurry
On the clustering front, expect interest to quiet down in the
performance-enhancing technology, now that Microsoft released its first iteration
of Cluster Server, previously known as Wolfpack.
Vendors announced a flurry of hardware and software products around the time
of Cluster Server's early fall launch, with everyone from Dell Computer Corp. to
NCR Corp. capitalizing on the hype.
Dell introduced its PowerEdge Cluster, an Intel-based server that uses Cluster
Server technology, while NCR increased Cluster Server's two-node maximum to
16 with LifeKeeper 2.0 clustering middleware.
Compaq, IBM and NEC are just a few of the vendors that have shipped or are
readying Cluster Server-compati- ble offerings, many of which are designed to
extend that product's capabilities while Microsoft prepares Phase 2, which the
company said will increase the number of nodes to four.
Dataquest industry analyst Jerry Sheridan said he believes it will be a while before
Microsoft delivers on its promise.
"I don't think we will see anything new from Microsoft until mid-1998 or the third
quarter," he predicted. "And it will likely not be tied to Windows NT 5.0, but
coincidental to it."
Novell has its own clustering story to tell in 1998. The Orion product-part of
Novell's Wolf Mountain initiative, which is slated to ship by year's end-will enable
two to 16 nodes to be clustered out of the box, according to Michael Bryant,
director of marketing.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
