SAN Buzz February I

Exciting news from IBM today: The IBM System Storage™ SAN768B is the next generation high-performance, high-density and high-availability SAN fabric backbone designed to be the foundation for large enterprise-class infrastructure simplification.
It provides up to 512 wire-speed, non-oversubscribed 8 Gbps ports in a single rack (or 768 ports slightly oversubscribed at 1.5:1) and interoperates with the m-type family (McDATA) of IBM directors.
For features and details refer to the IBM Announcement Letter.
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A green touch for the platform is provided with the new SAN Cabinet containing Intelligent Power Distribution Units (iPDUs) which are designed to measure and monitor energy consumed by the attached products.

SAN Buzz January III

The latest hot news comes from the (storage) networking folks at 170 West Tasman Drive: CISCO did announce their Nexus platform this week (included on the CISCO webiste is a nice overview clip).
A good analyisis can be found here and here.

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They refer to this as data center 3.0 platform, a unified network platform for the datacenter. Important to note however that this is all future promises for the time being: no Fibre Channel cards or support have been announced at this time.

SAN Buzz January II

This weeks news come from our friends at 1745 Technology Drive in San Jose:
Brocade did announce their first new director platform after the completion of the McDATA acquisition.
Although I didn't have a chance to see the product myself so far, the specs and pictures all indicate that it is basically an evolution of the Brocade 48000 director which has been around for some time.
Interestingly enough, they re-implemented an idea originally used in an Inrange Director (2001 timeframe) called XCA (extensible core architecture) which now goes by the name of ICLs (inter-chassis links) in 2008: Build high-port count SAN units by connecting multiple (two in Brocades' case) directors' backplanes. On second thought, this shouldn't be a big surprise: Inrange was acquired by CNT which was acquired by McDATA which was acquired by Brocade last year...
And due to fibre channel addressing limitations, Brocade in its 2008 implementation has to maintain the individual "domains" in the connected directors, so technically, there is a "hop" between the upper and lower unit.
The DCX highlights:

• native interoperability with McDATA and Brocade platforms
• Vitual fabrics (management zones)
• integrated routing capability for each port
• first 8 Gbps product on the market (8 Gbps blades will also be made available for the Brocade 48000)

More to follow as details become available...

SAN Buzz January I (2008)

The new year takes off with some great news from our storage division here at IBM: On January 2nd, IBM has acquired XIV Information Systems, a privately-held storage solutions development company based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

XIV Information Systems, including its development activities, engineers, employees and technologies, will become part of STG’s System Storage business unit and will remain in Israel.

Regarding the name of the company, the Jerusalem Post has a hint as to where it originally came from.

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This is a great move for IBM STG in a couple different ways:

a) The architecture used in XIVs products ("Nextra") is nothing less than revolutionary and clearly shows the way how "information management" solutions will be built in the 21st century: "Nextra is a SAN storage system built around next generation cluster technology to provide dynamic scale, auto-tuning and self-healing to the data layer. The architecture is based upon commodity components to provide lower cost." (Quote from the brand new ESG white paper)

b) The chairman of the board of XIV, Moshe Yanai, is a very well known person in the industry: While at EMC in the 1990s, Yanai served as the vice president of engineering and is widely credited as being the inventor of that company’s flagship Symmetrix storage array.

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An excellent piece of analysis and summary can be found here and here!

SAN Buzz for December I

Holiday Season is coming up, and for those of you still searching for a gift for someone in the storage industry, here's my choice!

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In the SAN realm, here's what I found most noteable during the last couple of weeks. I was traveling quite a bit, so may have missed out on a few new hot topics, but I don't think I missed a major new trend during that time.

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Byte&Switch brought us a very useful summary of future storage interconnects and IBM -at the same time- did announce a whole new set of solutions around intreconnects in a blade server environment:
The IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager provides I/O virtualization and can help cut cost and complexity for clients through its open architecture. IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager supports the complete range of Ethernet and Fibre Channel technologies.
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And while Brocade did announce FY 2007 results which came in as expected, sentencing for their former CEO Greg Reyes is still pending: the date has been postponed indefinitely and as the local San Jose newspaper Mercury News reports, support was building up for Reyes in the industry with hundreds of supporters writing to district Judge Charles R. Breyer who -according to Fortune magazine- found that "..the government had failed to quantify any amount of loss that can be attributed to Reyes’ conduct.”
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Lastly, here's a list of the most unusual data disaster stories of 2007, hope yours is not on the list: "Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off his computer and sprayed the interior with insect repellent. ...
The ants didn't make it, and neither did the drive"

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!

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!