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COMPUTING

Users need to take care to evade SAN trap

January 4, 2000
Web posted at: 10:54 a.m. EST (1554 GMT)

by Deni Connor

From...
Network World Fusion

(IDG) -- The world's insatiable appetite for information has helped ensure a bright future for storage-area networks (SAN) and the underlying Fibre Channel technology. But for the abundance of vendors that want a piece of the action today, it's an uphill battle to convince users to buy into a new, unfamiliar technology.

For one thing, many would-be SAN users aren't entirely convinced they need a parallel storage network. Nor are they thrilled about abandoning the investments they've already made in direct-attached storage drives and backup devices. In addition, a lack of standards makes users wary about committing to vendors.

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Still, these obstacles haven't stopped many vendors from racing to carve a niche for themselves somewhere in the enterprise-level SAN architecture. Among those stricken with SAN fever are Fibre Channel hub, switch and controller vendors, such as Ancor, Brocade Communications, Crossroads Systems, Emulex, Gadzoox and Vixel; storage vendors EMC, Hitachi, Storage Networks and StorageTek; system vendors Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM; backup vendors Legato and Veritas; and SAN start-ups Connex and SANCastle.

One company that did abandon the market is 3Com, which scrapped plans to produce Fibre Channel switches, hubs and host bus adapters less than six months after announcing its line. 3Com decided to bow out of SANs to focus on markets that are more closely aligned with its strengths, officials said in March.

3Com's withdrawal is symptomatic of the gap vendors need to bridge between two divergent technologies - the traditional storage interface SCSI, which is familiar to users and consistent with their idea of a converged network scenario; and newfangled Fibre Channel, which essentially reinvents the network. Right now, it's anyone's game.

Mixed messages

Vendors that have stuck with their SAN strategies spent the past year posturing - partnering among themselves, forming OEM sales relationships, introducing new SAN bundles and creating more architectures. In short, vendors have been laying the groundwork to deliver full-blown storage solutions to countless customers facing burgeoning amounts of data.

But now that the time has come to reign in customers, the odds are not in vendors' favor. "There are more storage-area networking vendors than there are users," says one analyst who asked not be identified.

In addition, SAN users to date are less free-spending than vendors hoped they would be. It seems many who are implementing SANs are doing so cautiously, putting in limited, small projects to prove the concept before moving on to more grandiose schemes.

One example is Bruce Covey of Home Depot in Smyrna, Ga. Covey constructed a modest SAN that connects several Macintosh workstations to Avid video-editing storage via a Fibre Channel hub, but this SAN is separate from the remainder of Home Depot's corporatewide SAN.

Yet another issue is that users are implementing mostly homogenous solutions - for example, linking a bunch of Windows NT servers to a single disk subsystem and installing a second SAN to take care of Unix or mainframe servers. Chief Techie Fool Dwight Gibbs of The Motley Fool did just that. He has a Compaq StorageWorks SAN for database access and a Network Appliance file server for network services. He wants his database traffic to be as fast as possible and unaffected by the network traffic. "When you start mixing and matching vendors for something new like Fibre Channel, you have a lot of finger-pointing. We wanted to avoid that," Gibbs says. "When there's a problem, I know exactly who to talk to."

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Such installations aren't exactly what SAN vendors envision. They insist one of the greatest strengths of a SAN is its heterogeneous capabilities. Vendors want to see users tie SANs to their networks, connecting all of their servers with some routers or switches to all their disk and tape storage - courtesy of a single vendor that offers a complete line of Fibre Channel products from companies with which it's partnered.

That's the reason vendors trudged along last year building end-to-end SAN packages they expected would be attractive to users. Now trained systems integrators and consultants are available, and vendors have done all the OEMing they can. Their SAN bundles work, vendors say, and it's time for adoption.

But users are hearing different advice from people such as Bruce Congdon, vice president of strategic innovation and architecture for New York's National Association of Securities Dealers, the parent company of the NASDAQ stock exchange. Congdon recommends buying a SAN from a single vendor and trying a "low-impact, non-mission-critical application" for your first SAN investment. Once you've acquired knowledge from the vendor, go out and buy other routers or switches based on the knowledge you've obtained, he says.

This advice plays into users' reluctance to give up proven methods for something new and unfamiliar. To win users, SAN vendors must get them to view networking in a completely new way and convince them that storage data must be separated from network data by a parallel data infrastructure.

Supporting the vendors' position are analysts such as Michael Peterson of Strategic Research in Santa Barbara, Calif. He agrees that separating storage traffic from network traffic is essential. After all, storage traffic amounts to 25% of all network traffic, Peterson says.

It's not an easy sell, but the message is beginning to sink in. Users are starting to slowly understand the need for SANs, says Dave Hill, storage research director at Aberdeen Group in Boston. But he warns that SANs will be as slow to catch on as networks were in the '80s.

One reason is that there's just too much new technology to assimilate. "SANs are at the stage that LANs were at 10 years ago," says Peter Tarrant, vice president of marketing and business development at switch specialist Brocade. "A lot of uncertainty exists."

To deal with user trepidation, Brocade is altering its strategy, which previously centered on high-end, multiport Fibre Channel fabric switches. In November, the company expanded its focus and introduced small, eight-port switches to compete with managed hubs made by Gadzoox and Vixel. There is a huge market to be tapped in small installations, Tarrant acknowledges.Until users become more confident, vendors need to provide the SAN products that they're willing to invest in today.

Stalled standards, management tools

Another obstacle to widespread SAN implementation is interoperability. At this point, it's unclear whether any SAN products interoperate or not. Throw them all into a lab and you'll likely find that one switch won't work with another switch. Or one host bus adapter may work fine with routers from vendors A, B and C, but won't work at all with products from vendors D, E and F.

While vendors claim to be working on interoperability, their efforts are divided and self-serving, for the most part. EMC, for example, is starting its own interoperability lab to see if everyone else's equipment works with its products. But to be effective, interoperability testing needs to be performed by a single body, observers say, not groups of vendors each testing its own solutions. So far only Ancor, Brocade, Gadzoox, McData and Vixel have shown impartiality and are working to make sure their switches interoperate in the same SAN.

A logical venue for consistent interoperability testing might be any of the quasi-standards bodies. The Storage Network Industry Association, in fact, has started interoperability working groups to establish some measures of conformance. But Bob LiVolsi, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Crossroads, says: "Standards are going to be set by the market and not by a trade association."

Until that happens, you would be wise not to add switches or other devices until you can prove interoperability with other SAN equipment. Ask for a money-back guarantee and see if you get one. The Motley Fool's Gibbs is one savvy user who asked for a money-back guarantee from Compaq and got it.

Manageability issues are also hindering SAN progress. There's no single management standard, and vendors are all over the map: Some vendors have proprietary management software to control their devices. Others, including Emulex and Crossroads, incorporate HP's SureStore E SAN Manager LM software. Still others, including EMC, have formed blood-brother relationships with traditional system management vendors, such as Computer Associates, to codevelop storage management packages.

The importance of management shouldn't be downplayed. The advantages of SANs - LAN-free and serverless backup, data vaulting, remote mirroring, dual-active copying, high availability and fault tolerance - make managing a storage network more complex. Managing storage is so essential that it costs $7 more per hour than storage itself. According to Dataquest, the storage management market will exceed $6.6 billion in 2003, up from $2.6 billion in 1998.

While the groundwork for storage-area networking has been laid, what remains is for vendors to convince more users to adopt SANs and to convince those that do to be more aggressive in their SAN implementations, which to date have been relatively modest. To do that, vendors need to agree on standards, guarantee interoperable products and resolve management shortcomings - in short, deliver on the promise of heterogeneous SANs.

Fibre Channel goes the distance

At the root of SANs' tough sell is a technology that diverges from that of every other network infrastructure vendor pitching convergence of voice, video and data: Fibre Channel. Though vendors claim Fibre Channel is better at moving all three types of traffic, it's as embryonic in the client/server world as the SAN it spawned.

Nonetheless, its reputed strengths are impressive. Fibre Channel works well over long distances; has a higher potential speed and sends larger blasts of data at a single time than Gigabit Ethernet; runs multiple protocols, including IP and SCSI; and allows greater scalability than SCSI. New implementations of 2G bytes/sec Fibre Channel are starting to appear, and Fibre Channel isn't expected to max out until 10G bytes/sec - ten times as fast as Gigabit Ethernet.

Fibre Channel tops SCSI in scalability, speed and distance. Users are limited to 16 devices with Wide Ultra2 SCSI; with Fibre Channel, 126 devices are allowed. Wide Ultra2 SCSI operates at 80M bytes/sec; Fibre Channel presently operates up to 100M bytes/sec and potentially up to 10G bytes/sec. Wide Ultra2 SCSI extends to distances of 12 meters; Fibre Channel will go 70,000 meters.

Today, nearly all storage vendors support Fibre Channel. A few holdouts exist, such as Adaptec and Winchester Systems, who say that a new technology, dubbed Ultra 160M SCSI, gives new life to the aging storage standard. Ultra 160M SCSI will operate at 160M bytes/sec, but only operates with a single protocol. SCSI isn't useful in environments where storage is separated by a large distance from its server, or where storage needs to interact with the IP-based needs of a Web-based enterprise, says Dave Hill, analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston.


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