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

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (1142)	3/31/1999 3:56:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Respond to of 4808

Aberdeen NGIO excerpt: NGIO's Silver Bullet: Easing the Building of Enterprise Computing Environments Over the last two years, one of the buzzwords of the server industry has been "System Area Networks," especially concerning the use of the Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture and the use of network-attached storage. The deployment of NGIO-enabled servers will likely give customers the ease of use necessary to support a number of technologies that now are difficult to deploy because of the historical limits of LAN environments - and facilitate the software and OS enhancements to support many of these new technologies. These enhancements include: High availability and performance clusters; Network-Attached Storage environments (and Fibre Channel) storage interconnects; Larger Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) servers; and, Multi-user environments focused on "server-centric" computing. Aberdeen Group suggests that the use of clusters for both high availability and, more importantly, performance will grow with the emergence of NGIO - because of the use of the VI architecture as a key communication protocol between servers in a cluster. Further, the cost of creating clusters will essentially become much more cost-effective (from a management and deployment cost perspective) - due to the way storage systems can be shared via NGIO's fabric switch and its projected ability to allow multiple modular servers to share a fabric switch and I/O devices. Over the next several years, the proliferation of network-attached storage and Storage Area Networks will grow as more enterprises adopt a simplified approach to centralizing storage systems. Considered server-independent storage, Network-Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks move toward storage utilities with virtual pools of storage - external to server architectures. With NGIO, Network-Attached Storage will become the norm as customers connect servers via fabric switches and I/O controllers to storage servers, disk arrays, and storage media. NGIO complements existing storage area network infrastructure such as Fibre Channel by providing a more direct link to main memory for host devices. By utilizing multiple links from a server to I/O units, NGIO will also facilitate the use of peer-to-peer communications, with I/O devices communicating without involving server CPU units in the dialogue. Finally, NGIO as an architecture will allow IS executives to take an "a la carte" approach to building server environments. For example, customers will be able to build new modularity into the number of CPU/memory elements needed to support larger SMP environments.