IBM's San World 2001 event was held in the South of France last
month, and IBM seems to be changing its Storage Area Network
tune.
The message that the industry should move beyond the San/Nas
debate, was sent out loud and clear by host IBM to its partners and
customers at the San World 2001 conference in Cannes April 9-12,
2001. The focus of the conference was storage networking across
heterogeneous environments and bridging network infrastructures,
such as fibre channel, IP (internet protocol), gigabit Ethernet,
and the emerging InfiniBand.
In a tacit admission that true Sans will never work, IBM believes
that the answer lies with 'intelligent storage network solutions'.
IBM's 'vision' is Storage Tank, where there is a software layer in
all the servers that allows them to share the same data, and to
have automated storage management systems.
Or, as Dietmar Wendt, vice president, Storage Systems, IBM EMEA,
put it in IBM-speak: 'Our answer is that we remove this data from a
current distributed information infrastructure to an intelligent
storage driven information e-infrastructure, which is central to
integrating a pervasive world. We need to move our customers from
islands of information to a centralised world of information.'
Big Blue was pushing its vision, calling other suppliers to join
the technology drive. The key words at Cannes were interoperability
and open standards. 'Data e-storage is up by 100 per cent every
year. Interoperability and data sharing is important, because it's
about money and reducing costs. You need data sharing and complete
interoperability between heterogeneous platforms. What we will see
is a change in the competitive environments,' said Wendt.
'Universal data exists, and this is what our customers are
demanding. We are expanding the system to much broader source;
virtualising not just the box, but the whole storage network. We
will implement lifecycle quality management from the highest point
in the environment for the open environment. This is an open vendor
system solution, not an IBM proprietary solution,' claims
Wendt.
IBM claims it is leading the development of open standards for
storage, and is inviting others to join in. 'IBM has moved from a
simple acknowledgement of the Linux movement by embracing the open
source and open standards philosophy into our storage networking
solutions,' claims Linda Sanford, senior vice president and group
executive, Storage Systems Group. At San World, Dr Ed Grochowski,
IBM guru of storage devices at the Almaden Research Centre,
confirmed that the standards would be open and published, so that
others will be able to meet them. This coincides with an
announcement by Intel to release the iSCSI (Small Computer Systems
Interface over IP) specification as open-source software.
Time will tell if IBM's storage competitors, EMC and Network
Application, join in and develop the storage standards along IBM
lines.
Big splash
Flagging network giant and IBM partner,
Cisco, made a big splash at Cannes by announcing its move into the
storage market. Previously solely in networking, Cisco is now
focusing on developing network products that will allow customers
to deploy storage applications. It launched, at Cannes, the first
product available for the Cisco Storage Networking Initiative, the
SN 5420 Storage Router, which is a multi-interface platform that,
apparently, allows devices on IP networks to access pools of fibre
channel storage. It works together with iSCSI drivers installed in
hosts servers, which encapsulate the SCSI data and transports them
to the 5420 Router over TCP/IP, which then forwards the data to any
fibre channel based storage device on the network.
'The challenges facing the industry are the inherent lack of
security and interoperability in fibre channel. San is currently
impeding SMEs to provide applications to their customers. The 5420
Router, through iSCSI, solves many of these of those problems,'
claimed Chris Huggett, new technology sales, Cisco Systems EMEA.
'Customers who want to connect service provider with storage
environments are typically well versed in IP Internet technology.
The service provider can utilise the Ethernet plus the security
features of IP network; they can share their storage and storage
networking resources among different customers while the security
is maintained.'
Brocade, a networking switch specialist, announced the Silkworm
12000 Core Fabric Switch, which, it said, expands the capabilities
of existing fibre channel storage environments and is extensible to
support both IP and InfiniBand networks. 'We have a range of
bridging platforms of fixed configurations, modular and high-end
platforms, and on top of that we're incorporating a variety of
fabric operations - what is called our Fabric OS (operating
systems) capabilities,' claimed Paul Trowbridge, Brocade EMEA
marketing director. The Fabric OS extensions include advanced
fabric services and expanded San management which, apparently,
enhances San application capabilities by providing management
information.
The standard for switches has been defined, but the ability to mix
different switches on the same network will not be available on any
product until the second half of this year. Trowbridge does not
believe that customers will want to field mixed switch networks
just because there is interoperability. 'Customers want to have as
few vendors as possible in an open environment. This makes the
support easier and the training more simple. What customers want
from standards is the ability to change vendors and choose freely
who their vendor is. Standards put pressure on the vendors to
supply what customers want because if not, they will go somewhere
else.'
Joy Macknight