SAN leaders look to the future |
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By the451.com, Special to searchStorage
06 Jun 2001 | the451.com |
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Most leading storage network vendors roundly dismiss
suggestions that IP-based storage systems will replace
fiber channel technology in enterprise datacenters
anytime soon, but they are increasingly willing to
acknowledge that IP does have a longer-term role in
enterprise storage systems.
At a meeting in New York organized by the Storage
Networking Industry Association to unveil new initiatives
that improve interoperability between storage area
networking products, industry leaders were clearly stung
by suggestions that they had taken too long to respond to
customer complaints about interoperability issues ? and
that this had opened the door for rival storage
infrastructure technologies, including SOIP (storage over
IP).
Instead, industry leaders such as Brocade, Compaq,
EMC, IBM, Hitachi and McData pointed out that the fiber
channel-based SAN industry is still relatively young.
"SANs are not really in their infancy, they are really
adolescents," said Mark Sorenson, vice president of
Compaq's enterprise storage software business. Others,
including Donald Swatik, vice president of global
alliances for EMC, insisted that, in relative terms, SANs
had already achieved a greater level of maturity than
other technologies at the same stage in their evolution.
Nevertheless, executives acknowledged that IP is
likely to play a role in future enterprise storage
systems, although they said it was likely to be a long
time before IP-based systems delivered the features and
security demanded by enterprise datacenter operators. "It
is a question of 'when,' rather than 'whether'," said
Swatik, who also emphasized that EMC is committed to the
use of IP-based storage where appropriate. "We are very
pro IP, but we are pragmatic," he said.
EMC has already installed a transatlantic mirrored
storage facility using IP for one of its customers and is
fitting its high-end Symmetrix arrays with IP, which will
enable them to support both SANs and network-attached
storage models. However, like other fiber channel storage
vendors, EMC cautions on the limitations of current
IP-based NAS and points out that for some applications,
fiber channel remains more efficient than IP.
One factor that could shift the balance would be the
creation of a block-level protocol for use over both FC
and IP networks. The ability to run file and block-level
commands over IP, something analysts believe EMC is
working on, would enable IP-based storage infrastructures
to more nearly replicate the performance of fiber channel
systems.
But even then, there is considerable debate over how
pervasive SOIP will become in the long term. For the
moment at least, fiber channel vendors remain confident
that fiber channel will remain the storage technology of
choice for enterprise users ? provided they can address
outstanding customer issues, including true
interoperability.
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