Adaptec seeks to come as close as anyone has to providing the Holy Grail of storage solutions with new and future products, solving, it says, problems of price, speed, reliability and manageability.
The company, whose local agent is Drive Control Corporation (DCC), has launched a series of SCSI-based RAID cards and controllers, enabling host-based RAID or network-centric RAID, as well as its enclosure-based storage solution, DuraStor, scaling to multiple drives and channels.
In addition, it debuts an array of technologies that transforms SCSI blocks into Ethernet packets, and a TCP/IP offload engine, which frees up host or enclosure CPUs to do the kind of processing it was meant for.
To understand the need for all this, Nilesh Patel, sales director for Adaptec`s Nordic region (into which SA apparently falls), offers a quick history of storage, summarising it along the lines of the need for speed, reliability, uptime and price. "There`s a lot of data out there," Patel says, "and solutions that solve these issues are critically important to corporate performance."
Traditional storage in enterprises basically entails a bunch of servers, each with its own storage needs, handled in the box. It`s fast, but capacity is limited, and such a distributed storage area configuration made for a nightmarish management scenario, one justified only because there was fast data transmission (with no network to cross).
Then came network storage, either in network-attached (NAS) form or in a storage area network (SAN). The former comes in the form of a specialised file server, complete with stripped-down operating system, and adds additional storage quickly and easily, simply plugging into a hub or switch, using traditional LAN protocols (TCP/IP and Ethernet).
Since Ethernet is a technology everyone uses and understands, this was great. But speed lacked, and storage area networks, driven by fibre channel, became the standard answer. Of course, fibre channel is expensive, and although Ethernet gives a good account of itself, especially with Gigabit Ethernet line speeds, this was particularly processor-intensive.
"For every Megabit-per-second data transfer, one MHz processing power in the host is used," says Patel, addressing a room full of DCC resellers at Inanda Club, Johannesburg. "We are introducing bandwidth-enhancing technology in the form of iSCSI (Internet SCSI) by the end of the first quarter, and storage devices featuring TCP/IP offload engines, to heighten the performance of Ethernet."
The advantages of Ethernet as storage fabric are manifold. "You can save on skills, therefore fewer people administer this; cut down on storage management overhead (normal network management tools also manage storage in an Ethernet/IP-based storage network); you have investment protection (scaling one`s investment in storage using VLANS, leased-lines and the like); and we offer all the redundancy tools needed to provide failover."
Patel says the alternatives when implementing SANs (provided fibre didn`t hold you back) are to get an all-in-one tier-one vendor solution, or get a smaller, customised one. "Tier-one vendors do, however, not test extensively in heterogeneous environments," he says. "They can act a bit restrictively in terms of warranty should you want a differently branded drive, and the cost can be high. Smaller vendors, willing to mix it up, do less stringent testing, and warranty and support can be a problem."
He says Adaptec can fill the gap in the market. "We offer RAID from ATA-based to SCSI to fibre. It is all Adaptec, it is all one management interface, and you can scale from host-based solutions to enclosure-based to SAN solutions."
All Adaptec cards have integrated RAID on the chip, offering mirroring and striping with up to six drives, with multiple channels enabling tape backup.
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