* What was demonstrated at Storage Network World
At last week’s Storage Networking World, interoperability across heterogeneous devices may have been king, but the royal court consisted of a robust set of interoperable storage solutions from a widening number of vendors.
We saw an impressive management demonstration featuring a mix of high-end and midrange arrays from EMC (Symmetrix and Clarion); HDS (Lightening and Thunder); IBM (ESS and FASTt); and Xiotech (Magnitude). They were all being managed together in a storage-area network (SAN) that had Brocade, Cisco, CNT, McData and QLogic directors, and edge connectors from Cisco, IBM and McData. A long-distance management demonstration (featuring storage resource management software from AppIQ, Computer Associates, CreekPath, Crosswalk, EMC, Hitachi, IBM, Sun and Veritas) put the Fibre Channel SAN at SNIA’s Colorado Springs facility through its paces while being managed from the show’s Orlando site.
The Interoperability and Solutions Demo area contained live demonstrations of storage solutions for virtualization; infrastructure; backup and recovery; business continuance and disaster recovery; storage management; information lifecycle management (ILM); and regulatory compliance. Here are some of the highlights.
IP storage had a much bigger showing than in the past, both at the interoperability demonstrations and on the show floor. The heart of the “Small Office Demo” was iSCSI, but it is quite clear that the vendors backing IP-based storage are now looking much further up-market than was the case when iSCSI first appeared. If this continues, and if storage over IP can ride the “powers of 10” throughput increases that the improved Ethernet speeds provide and the manageability of IP-based SCSI is seen as having achieved parity with Fibre Channel-based SAN storage, expect IP storage to compete to head-to-head against fibre-based storage at every level where fibre now plays.
E-mail archiving has become the poster child application for ILM. All incoming and outgoing mail is indexed; snapshot, backup and recovery services are provided; storage can be multi-tiered to accommodate short term (where data will be accessed with comparatively high frequency) and long-term (where data is expected to be accessed infrequently) archiving; and the pipe can be iSCSI, Fibre Channel or both.
The SAN instrumentation dog-and-pony show was impressive. Finisar demoed a set of tools that lets managers use line rate monitoring to track SAN performance and provide analysis for identifying root cause issues. This company’s monitoring and analysis tools are on just about every network engineer’s test bench; Finisar is now rolling out an IT version of those tools with a much more people-friendly user interface. Now that they have removed from the display all the cyber-crud that engineers love but IT managers detest, storage managers can efficiently look at individual parts of the storage environment – initiators, targets, LUNs, Fibre Channel and SCSI issues – as they tune SAN performance and diagnose errors.
All in all the show was interesting, with what seems to have been larger attendance and increased vendor representation. On the down side, end users were still in the minority, a situation only partially mitigated by the Red Sox win.
