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

To: J Fieb who wrote (1166)	4/14/1999 8:42:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

techweb.com Acts as systems integrator in storage-area-network alliances -- StorageTek leads SAN push Loring Wirbel Louisville, Colo. - Storage Technology Corp. is positioning itself to become a force in storage-area networks, linking up with several software developers and Fibre Channel switch specialists in an effort to take the pain out of SAN for end users. The company's "SANaps" thrust will place it in the position of systems integrator, working with its partners to create full-blown SAN applications. StorageTek said it launched its SANaps initiative to ease the transition to networked storage. Don Kleinschnitz, the company's vice president of strategic marketing for SANs, said the short-term effort will center on accomplishing backup without interrupts to the LAN infrastructure. Though some software specialists-including SANaps partner Legato Systems Inc.-have built a business around backup over the LAN, Kleinschnitz said that Legato has been key in developing dynamic allocation of storage devices using Fibre Channel and storage-management protocols, hence performing all backup duties in a pure SAN environment. Veritas Software Corp. is another SANaps partner, as are switch specialists like Brocade Communication Systems Inc. and JNI Corp. StorageTek will treat all backup SANaps as a systems-integration duty, offering a full-access hub, bridge, software, tape library and services and maintenance suite for a single price. For entry-level systems, the fee will be around $150,000. Later this year, StorageTek will launch SANaps for capacity expansion, making it possible to add heterogeneous storage devices without bringing the network down; and distance extension, which will take remote storage resources to a common SAN-first over an extended-reach Fibre Channel system in a campus environment and later over WAN protocols for metropolitan and regional storage networks. Kleinschnitz said that the Vista Interoperability Labs will become a de facto certification facility for SAN developers over the next few months. In fact, he said, interest in the lab is so high that StorageTek now has to prioritize all the projects proposed for it. Meanwhile, StorageTek, Legato and several other systems vendors in the Storage Networking Industry Alliance (SNIA) held a special conference last week to reiterate the multiple fronts in which the SNIA is working to make SANs easier to configure. Computer makers like Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are eager for SNIA to show progress in SANs, particularly with the recent defection of 3Com Corp. from SAN interests. But Darren Thomas, vice president of the multivendor storage division at Compaq, was quick to admit that SNIA needs more participation from the giants in internetworking. SNIA is not a standards body, but works with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and American National Standards Institute on protocols for storage. The SNIA helps develop standard profiles for how these emerging standards are implemented. EMC Corp.-which has worked with the FibreAlliance to promote its own SNMP management-information base to the IETF-and Sun Microsystems Inc., which has promoted the StorageX initiative for SAN frameworks, played prominent roles in the April 5 SNIA conference. Both companies reiterated that their independent efforts were subsidiary to the joint standards SNIA was trying to forge. Walt Hinton, chief strategist at StorageTek, said SNIA still needs to develop a consistent front to deal with end users of RAID farms and similar storage networks. Customers like these are confused, he said, with the variety of SAN coalitions and ad hoc implementation efforts in the industry. techweb.com EMC is so strong in storage that none of the server vendors want anything to do with it," said James Staten, senior analyst at Dataquest, San Jose, Calif. "They don't want EMC to have a say in how their servers are deployed." techweb.com The need for high availability is going to smaller and smaller systems, and the need for availability on high-end systems is growing,'' says Bob McGraw, worldwide market development manager for Hewlett-Packard's enterprise storage business unit. "You can't even have planned downtime any longer.'' Jeffrey Schnabel, director of marketing for the multivendor storage business unit at Compaq, agrees. "There is zero tolerance for downtime,'' Schnabel says. "I can buy books at six or seven different Web sites. If I can't get a book at Amazon.com, I can get to Barnes and Noble in about five seconds.''