SAN Buzz April

Time for an update: I'm currently in Moscow where I gave an update on recent storage networking standards at the local IDC conference. The translator has left and since most of the afternoon presentations are going to be in Russian (and I don't understand any Russian so far), there's some time for informal work.

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In summarizing the past couple of weeks, there was a bunch of news around the SNW 2008 in Orlando, much of it related to FCoE and clustered storage concepts. Here's a couple of useful writeups:

CISCO buys Nuova Systems and introduces first (pre-standart) FCoE hardware.

The Enterprise Systems Journal featured a nice article about how to position this new unified networking standard. So FCoE is definitely an important trend to watch and the value proposition around consolidating server interconnects looks very promising!

The second hot segment is clustered storage in all shapes and forms: Infostor had an excellent piece on this new architecture and Xiotech invented the term ISE (Intelligent Storage Element) to describe their new solution based on a very modular approach to combine hard drive resources to form a resilient, scalable and flexible storage system. Not sure if this is supposed to bring back memories of the ICE cube project done at IBM Almaden a couple years ago.

And despite of all the current hype around solid state drives (SSD), the good old mechanical harddrive is still the single most important building block for our entire industry!

SAN Buzz March

Returning to the office after the Easter break more felt like new year this time: with temperatures hovering around Zero (Celsius) and snow piling up in the streets, spring seems like months away.


However, you can tell it's spring time by a couple of signs in our industry:

1. Conference and Trade show season is in full swing.
2. Analyst predictions for what's going to be hot and not in 2008 get less frequent.
3. The storage vendors release their spring collections of gear and hype.

Ontop of this, I wanted to share a couple of very well written acrticles related to three storage topics which I believe will be important and relevant for the rest of the year:

• FCoE
• Tape Storage
• Clustered Storage
  
  

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"