Today's focus:  The buzz at Storage Networking World, Part 2

By Mike Karp

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.
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Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He
has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and
telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail
<mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
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Copyright Network World, Inc., 2004