More ATA, iSCSI vendors dive into the storage pot

The year has started with a bang for those of us interested in ATA, iSCSI and IP-based storage-area networks.  I wrote a few weeks ago that this would develop into a banner year for both ATA-based storage and iSCSI – it’s still January, but some vendors have already started to turn the crank.

Last week, Xiran (http://www.xiran.com) announced its DPA-1400 iSCSI host adapter, a device that can be used in both imitator and target modes.  The dual-port PCI-X device offers full TCP/IP and iSCSI offload capability (deploying these chores from the CPU to the HBA means that the CPU on the host or target device is freed-up to do other things). The company claims more than 30,000 I/Os per second per port, but I haven’t seen any verification of this yet.  If the claim holds true, this is impressive indeed.

This week, Candera (http://www.candera.com) announced its ATA appliance, a RAID device that uses low-cost ATA disks to distribute RAID processing across multiple devices.

The device is available in 4-, 8-, 12- and 16 T-byte configurations right out-of-the-box, but with external add-on storage these can scale to handle more than 180 T bytes.  The company claims the product can be deployed very rapidly, and provides excellent failover and load-balancing characteristics. It offers a centralized point of storage management and appears to be positioned squarely against EMC’s CLARiiON ATA storage box, but at a much lower price. Candera has cut a deal with IBM Global Services to provide worldwide service.

These announcements are just early examples of a long line of product rollouts in 2004 that will emphasize fast, price-competitive storage devices for companies that must keep one eye on their storage growth and the other on their budgets.  Look to see much more of the same during this and subsequent quarters.

The above announcements will not go unnoticed by the big dogs, of course. 

I look for IBM and HP to place even greater emphasis on servicing the midsize business market with their go-to-market efforts that are directed half through their channel partners and half through their internal sales forces. 

EMC will continue to work effectively with Dell to address mid-tier companies, but it doesn’t appear to have much capability of addressing any level of small and midsize businesses on its own.  This won’t be a problem for EMC as long as the Dell-EMC relationship continues to work successfully (Dell as an EMC sales channel now accounts for one-third of all EMC product revenue).

The pot continues to boil, so there is obviously much more to come.