* Brocade announces Tapestry Application Resource Manager
The worlds of servers and storage are converging with Brocade’s announcement of software that runs on a storage-area network and provisions blade servers with operating systems and applications.
Last month Brocade acquired Therion Software, a start-up in Redmond, Wash. The acquisition included nine programmers experienced with storage and Windows. Therion had been working on SAN software that allows blade servers – which these days don’t always ship with disk drives – to boot from the SAN and then get an image of the server’s operating system, settings and applications.
Brocade’s new Tapestry Application Resource Manager runs on its Fabric Application Platform, which connects blade servers to storage.
Tapestry ARM is unlike other provisioning software in that the image remains on the SAN rather than being transferred over the LAN from the storage array to the server. Redirection software lets the server see the SAN just as if it were a local hard drive. Because of the latency of the Fibre Channel connection, access is negligible.
The technology is much like the remote network boot that yesterday’s diskless workstations used. In those implementations, the server contained a disk image file for the network operating system. The disk image was created with Novell’s DOSGEN or Microsoft’s Remote Program Load. The diskless workstation was equipped with a boot ROM that allowed it to attach to the network and boot the workstation to the network.
Tapestry ARM is in early testing with several of Brocade’s OEM customers and will be generally available this fall.
