Americas

  • United States
michael_cooney
Senior Editor

Embedded storage technology

Opinion
Jan 29, 20031 min
Data Center

* Embedded storage switch technology promises lower costs, better performance and more

Our Technology Update this week looks at a technology that storage suppliers would likely use to boost their storage wares.

Specifically it looks at embedded storage switch technology that promises to reduce costs, boost performance and ease the administration of storage devices using the products.

Embedded storage vendor Vixel (Tom.Hammond-Doel@Vixel.com) wrote the article which details how its 2G bit/sec embedded storage switches can help eliminate RAID and network-attached storage bottlenecks. The technology is available in as a blade and ASIC and as a box.

Our author says that typically storage systems arrange several disks into a single enclosure known as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). Prior to the availability of the new level of integration brought by embedded storage switches, placing switching within the JBOD itself was impractical in modular storage systems due to real estate, power, heat and pricing issues. When embedded storage switching is added to the JBOD it becomes a Switched Bunch of Disks (SBOD), ultimately improving speed and availability, our author states.

There’s more to it than that though, for more see: http://www.nwfusion.com/tech/2003/0127techupdate.html