StorageTek has outlined its strategy to build open storage networks with management capabilities and information sharing between mainframe, Unix and Windows NT platforms. The company has also announced the delivery of its first products for building storage area networks (SANs) as part of the new StorageNet family of offerings.
The StorageNet family is a comprehensive product set for deploying reliable, high-speed storage area networks (SANs).
StorageNet is aimed at helping enterprise customers improve the overall performance of their business applications - the number one driver of IT spending on storage according to Gartner Group`s recent customer survey - by building open storage utilities.
The utility framework is designed to offload storage applications such as backup and recovery to a dedicated, managed SAN. This frees up network bandwidth for business applications.
"As competition increases, fast and reliable access to information becomes critical," says David E Weiss, StorageTek chairman, president and CEO. "We have chosen to be completely open, supporting information access between all hardware platforms and any storage device."
Much as water, and phone utility companies must serve customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, companies are expecting offering unprecedented levels of storage service. To deliver this service, StorageNet is leveraging StorageTek`s experience in tape libraries, disk subsystems and connectivity for mainframe, Unix and NT systems, as well as its Solutions Business Group for professional services and worldwide support organisation.
In contrast to open SANs, "captive" storage is managed by general-purpose file servers and prevents customers from scaling their tape or disk systems independent of the processor to accommodate data growth. StorageTek`s open architecture embraces heterogeneous environments and places software management capabilities out in the SAN. This delivers total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages while supporting the trend towards server recentralisation so customers can optimise administration resources in the data centre.
Fibre channel a key enabler
StorageNet solutions are highly available, high-performance dedicated networks for storage-centric applications that are enabled and managed today by fibre channel-based devices. Fibre channel, a proven connectivity technology between servers and storage or storage and storage, delivers high-speed, high-capacity throughput of up to 100MB/s, 2,5 times that of SCSI connections. It also lets users physically separate servers from storage by up to 10km, or more than 300 times the distance of SCSI. These capabilities have prompted industry-watcher EMF Associates to predict that the fibre channel market for hubs, routers and switches will grow to a $1bn industry by 2002.
Standards are still evolving in this area, and StorageTek is working through organisations such as the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC) and the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) to drive standards and develop technologies that align with standards-based frameworks.
Initially, the StorageNet family of fibre channel connectivity products for building SANs consists of:
- StorageNet Fibre Channel Hub 1000: This seven-port device is the basic SAN building block for deploying high-speed, high-bandwidth fibre channel arbitrated loops (FC-ALs).StorageNet Fibre Channel Bridge 3100: The Bridge 3100 preserves investments in legacy SCSI tape and disk devices with SCSI-to-fibre connectivity as customers build fibre channel SANs.
- StorageNet Fibre Channel Switch 4000: With this product, StorageTek offers a highly scalable, full-bandwidth fibre channel fabric for enterprise SAN environments. The 16-port Switch 4000 ships with a Web-based management interface and provides high-end access control and performance management capabilities.
- StorageNet Access Hub: A next-generation, multi-loop hub, this 32-port device supports up to 16-concurrent FC-ALs, or 16 times the capacity of a traditional hub. It includes a Web-based management interface, protects storage through controlled segmentation of server access, and lets administrators flexibly program and schedule loop configurations to match changing storage needs without recabling.
StorageTek and information sharing
StorageTek`s vision is to develop new technologies and products, and leverage strategic partnerships to deliver seamless information sharing, regardless of storage device or server platform.
Today, the StorageNet products offer customers basic connectivity for building dedicated SANs. The breadth of StorageTek`s fibre channel products deliver the benefits of increased distance while removing device addressing and performance barriers for storage networking. With the new StorageNet Fibre Channel Switch 4000 and forthcoming Access Hub, corporations can use Web-based GUIs to manage their SANs and update configurations as their business needs require.
By placing software intelligence in the SAN devices, the StorageNet management component will continue to take shape through 1999. For example, open application programming interfaces (APIs) for leading backup tools will fully enable dynamic configuration of the SAN based on changing storage needs.
Utilities will be added to enable hostless backup and lay the foundation for hierarchical storage management (HSM) over the SAN fabric.
StorageTek also has begun work on the next wave in SAN capabilities that build business process rules into the network. With features such as policy-based management, companies will be able to use network-resident software tools for access control, data privacy and storage management. This will include dynamic backup and advanced HSM that will enable StorageTek to enter into comprehensive service-level agreements with customers who want to control costs by optimising and tuning the storage environment.
Moving into the year 2000 and beyond, StorageTek plans to build network-resident file services into the SAN and offer integrated, file-based backup services.
By building these advanced functions into the SAN, StorageTek will ensure high performance, relieving servers and storage controllers of much of the overhead associated with server-storage and storage-storage communications. With this capability, StorageTek will position its customers to break down the walls and share information across the enterprise, regardless of storage location or platform.
* StorageTek products are represented in South Africa by CMS, a company in the MGX Holdings group.
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