* Achieving operation efficiency through storage consolidation
Consolidating storage is often a useful way to achieve operational efficiency and ease management, but what is the best way to reach such a goal? Intelligence can be located in storage arrays, on one or more hosts, or on an intelligent storage-area network switch. Today, we’ll look quickly at switches.
All the well-known names in switching plan on playing at the high end of the market, where technologies for consolidation are an expected part of the product mix. As a result, Brocade bought Rhapsody, Cisco invested in and then bought Andiamo, and McData acquired Sanera, all in order to have a play at the high end. Who else is out there?
As it turns out, if you have the need for high performance, high reliability switching services (director-class switches), and if you have the wherewithal to make a serious investment in core switching technology, there are several players that can provide you with consolidation capabilities as part of their package of high-end deliverables.
Here is a quick look at some of the other players, each of whom has something that may well justify your investing a bit of time on their Web site:
* Acopia
Acopia’s Adaptive Resource switches offer centralized management of geographically distributed unstructured data. The switch provides a global namespace for heterogeneous storage resources, providing transparent storage provisioning and consolidation. The Massachusetts-based start-up already has several blue-chip customers for its switches, which scale from 2U starter systems to enterprise-serving 13U chasses.
* CNT
CNT, which purchased the storage switch assets of InRange more than a year ago, rolled out its UltraNet Multi-service Director last summer. The UMD permits physical consolidation of storage while allowing logical segmentation for business, operational or security reasons. Redundant fabric services in each domain are designed to ensure both isolation of the various logical segments and continuous operation in the event of a failure.
* Maranti
Maranti is another SAN switch maker offering storage consolidation along with several other high value services. The company’s CoreSTOR switches scale up to 218 ports and come with Maranti’s STORIAN management suite, which allows multiple SAN islands to be managed as a single unified infrastructure.
* MaXXanm
MaXXan offers a storage consolidation solution in its MXV500 Intelligent SAN Switch. This is available with integrated “application cards” (blades with embedded software for network-attached storage gateways, storage appliances and one containing FalconStor’s IPstor virtual tape) integrated within the switch. It supports both a distributed and a centralized storage model, and provides up to 256 ports per chassis.
Consolidating your storage may have real value for you, but it also may come with some drawbacks: loss of departmental autonomy and the possibility of a problem cascading all across your storage are just some examples of this. Still, the convenience of a centralized management point is something few of us will complain about.
