Editor's note: Inrange's announcement of the availability of its ClearVSN and ExtendedVSN feature sets marks the second and third part of the company's IN-VSN Advanced Storage Networking product rollout. According to the Evaluator Group, this move improves on the ability by third-party storage management software and storage hardware vendors to plug into Inrange products via Inrange's own SN-API. The Evaluator Group claims that FICON cascading and support for the new 256-port FC/9000 are the most important features of this announcement.
ExtendedVSN is the set of software services focused on scalability and interoperability. It features support for:
- Scaling the IN-VSN FC/9000 seamlessly from 8 to 256 ports
- FICON Cascading, so that more than one director with FICON can be linked together
- Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) connectivity using extended buffer credits (64 buffer credits per port) to allow distances of up 100 kilometers (Extended Credit Addressing Facility (XCAF))
Support for FCIP and iSCSI connectivity will be added in the future.
ClearVSN is INRANGE's open management feature set developed for third-party software management vendors, providing access to features from INRANGE's suite of Advanced Storage Networking Services: PerformanceVSN, SecureVSN, and ExtendedVSN. All of ClearVSN features are accessed through INRANGE's Storage Networking Application Programming Interface (SN-API). SN-API has been shipping for months, although it was formally announced in June.
ClearVSN also includes a Developer's Program to assist in integrating INRANGE hardware and software services into third party vendor products and services. To date, over 20 vendors have applied for membership, and BMC, EMC, InterSAN, StorageNetworks, Tivoli and Veritas are either current storage management partners or they are in the process of being certified. In addition to SN-API, the ClearVSN Developer's Program provides access to:
- Fibre Channel Switch API (FC-SWAPI)
- Fibre Alliance MIB
- FC-GS-3/4 in-band management implementation
- SNMP MIB for INRANGE DWDM devices, channel extenders, and FC-to-IP routers
ClearVSN will provide access to CIM/WBEM in the future.
Both ExtendedVSN and ClearVSN are available today. No pricing information was available at the time of this publication.
Evaluator Group comments:
ClearVSN and ExtendedVSN are the second and third parts of the IN-VSN Advanced Storage Networking product rollout. PerformanceVSN was released a few months ago and SecureVSN has not been released yet. FICON Cascading and support for the new 256-port FC/9000 are the most important features from this announcement.
It is difficult to compare vendor APIs without a detailed side-by-side analysis to determine how many of the vendor-developed features are made available to third party vendors. For INRANGE, access to PerformanceVSN's rich feature set is a real plus that distinguishes INRANGE's SN-API from other vendors.
===========================================================
To view all Storage Evaluator analyses and commentaries, go to Storage Evaluator Tips
===========================================================
