Wednesday, October 24, 2007

SAN Buzz October II



This week, IBM had some major storage announcements, including new functions and solutions for almost all storage products accross the portfolio:
Virtualization, Disk Systems, and storage solutions targeted at SMBs.

Most important on the SAN-side are the IBM announcements of the CISCO MDS 9134 and 9222i as well as the 18/4 FCIP director blade.
These products complete CISCOs push into the switch market and leave customers with a choice of vendors across the entire IBM SAN portfolio!
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Here's some great coverage about a recent IBM Analyst meeting where STG Executives outlined the IBM storage strategy for 2008 and beyond.
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Searchstorage had this excellent article about SAN Best Practices and points out (among seven other potential pitfalls) to:
Understand the functional limitations of your switches (#3):
"Today, switches incorporate features that go beyond simply managing network communication, such as data migration and storage virtualization, which are common in the large director-class switches. The need for intelligent features, such as these, is frequently the motivation for switch upgrades and replacements, and storage administrators should consider intelligent features and their role in the data center"
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So, talking about intelligent switches, Brocade did use the SNW conference in Dallas and their recent Customer Event in Las Vegas to demo 8 Gbps SAN gear and outline their DCF (data center fabric) strategy.
Read comments here and here.
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And with the end of the year coming closer, here's more IT predictions for 2008: Gartner's top technology predictions for 2008
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My friends over at the IBM ITSO also have been very productive lately and here's two redbooks related to storage networks and IBM BladeCenter that you may find useful:

Implementing Cisco InfiniBand on IBM BladeCenter
Published: October, 2, 2007
and
Implementing the QLogic Intelligent Pass-Thru Module for IBM BladeCenter
Published: October, 2, 2007

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Last but not least -talking about Blades- here's my personal Blade-favorite for 2008: The Honda Fireblade!

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

SAN Buzz October


Here's a great piece on virtualization comparing appliance vs. network/switch based virtualization.

At a recent analyst meeting, Brocade executives did outline future strategies and talked about how they see the duopoly-SAN-market.
You can find the complete slides here and a good comment on the presented ideas and statements here.

Do you have hundreds, maybe thousands of SAN ports in your enterprise? And store TBs and maybe PBs of information? Then maybe you can be a contender in the "Worlds biggest SAN" contest!