Six storage vendors this week set out to prove that network-attached storage (NAS) and SANs can converge at a common point for backing up the network.
Legato, Network Appliance, Veritas, Vixel, Quantum/ATL and Spectra Logic got together to demonstrate the interoperability of tape libraries with shared NAS appliances and Fibre Channel SAN devices.
The demonstration was the first time vendors proved that NAS appliances, such as Network Appliance's filers, could share tape libraries with disk subsystems on a SAN over a Fibre Channel switch. The demo also showed the ability to back up data separately from the server and the network, thus relieving traffic on the network and processing on the server.
The configuration of the demo consisted of a Network Appliance filer containing a Qlogic Fibre Channel host bus adapter. The filer, which is traditionally connected to an Ethernet, is also connected to the SAN via a Fibre Channel Vixel switch. The switch is connected to a Quantum/ATL and Spectra Logic tape library. Data on the NAS is backed up to the tape library via the switch. No data flows across the Ethernet network or through the network server.
The trend is for filers to grow in size from gigabyte to multiterabyte size units, says Dave Hill, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston, Mass. No longer can NAS devices be backed up to a single tape drive and hence must be able to access tape libraries.
According to Dataquest of Stamford, Conn., the entry- and workgroup-level NAS appliance market alone will grow to almost $2.5 billion by 2002.
Though the collection of vendors has no plans to bundle the NAS/SAN products, individual vendors will continue to sell their products knowing that they are interoperable. In addition, the vendors do not intend to formalize the group into an interoperability consortium, although they welcome queries from other vendors on interoperability.
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