Grass Roots Awards Score An Industry First.

The I/O Conference and Expo conducted by Strategic Research Corporation (Santa Barbara, CA) added a unique event to the usual series of technical presentations and panel discussions. The well-known market research firm implemented a broadly-based grass roots awards program designed to recognize people and technologies endorsed by a "peoples' choice" balloting process.

"The opportunity to recognize excellence and to have it come from peers in the industry is really special," says Strategic Research president Michael Peterson. "We had almost 10,000 votes in the preliminary run-off. The winners in all three categories should be very proud. I'm especially pleased to honor Richie Lary, of Compaq, as the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Who will get it next year?"

Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Lary, formerly with Digital Equipment Corporation remained on board after the Compaq acquisition of Digital StorageWorks and directs the storage technology efforts with the computing giant. (Editor's Note: I've known Richie since the StorageWorks days; the man never fails to impress.)

Broad-Based Polling

Peterson shared some of the methodology used in the awards process. Last August, SRC opened nominations for the three awards, accepting online input into their web site. The company received close to 10,000 inputs, even after going through the tedious process of screening duplicates.

Peterson recalls wryly: "What a pain, but people did it."

Through this process, five finalists were identified for each category. These finalists were submitted to the attendees at the conference; over 350 were in attendance. The entire methodology was sensitive to big company skewing and was addressed with two principals in mind:

A. Preliminaries narrowed the field, but were biased by big companies with many employees who voted.

B. The conference leveled the voting population to eliminate big company bias and let the deserving winners emerge.

Technology Winners

The winner for the best new technology for the year 2000 was the V3 Storage Appliance developed by Veritas Software Corporation. The V3 toolset is a SAN management tool designed to provide key capabilities in a SAN environment such as discovery and visualization, device status monitoring, and centralized zoning configuration and administration.

The technology employs modular agents, a Java console, and an integrated, proprietary SAN Access Layer technology to provide management of the heterogeneous SAN environment. Management agents track performance and event data from Veritas Software's enterprise-class applications such as VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS File System, and VERITAS NetBackup. This approach provides monitoring, reporting, and policy automation. In a similar manner, agents enable capacity management by monitoring the state and performance of real or virtual storage resources such as tape devices, physical and logical volumes, and file systems.

The V3 SAN Management Tools employ a Java console in addition to natively passing data to third-party management software or frameworks already installed in the data center. The company reports that products are being developed for the Unix and Windows NT platforms and will be available next year.

The DEC legacy was present in the winner of the Best Product of 1999. Honors went to the E5A12000 subsystem from Compaq Computer Corp. The system is a scalable, high capacity storage subsystem. This system is one of the first set of products announced under the "Compaq StorageWorks" brand name. It is a multivendor Fibre Channel storage subsystem; the first offered by Compaq.

Commensurate with Compaq's Fibre Channel open platform strategy, these systems offer the storage solution specifically for the multivendor, multi-platform open systems market. The ESA12000 offers customers what the company claims is the functionality of mainframe-based storage at open system prices.

The ESA12000 FC is an integrated FC RAID storage system. The ESAl2000 product set has been extended to include SAN Fabric implementation with FC switches. Fabric provides the backbone needed to address geographically dispersed server operations with shared storage access across the enterprise. The distance advantages of Fibre Channel provide the foundation needed to implement business continuance features of the ESA12000, including disaster tolerance and remote copy. Additionally the ESA12000 also supports the ATM features of FC switches, so SANs and remote copying can now be extended around the world. The ESAl2000 promises economical capacity growth, increased levels of availability, lower cost of storage management, and provides a base for layered business continuity features. Multi-vendor platform support for Fibre Channel loop and switches now includes Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, Windows NT on Intel servers, Sun Solaris, HPUX, Novell NetWare, IBM AIX, and SGI IRIX.

The ESAl2000 takes advantage of the SAN built with switches in several ways, which are incorporated in the Array Controller Software (ACS). ACS takes advantage of the capability by providing a Server Access Control (SAC) feature used to limit visibility of the storage set to servers on the list. Servers can be of the same type (homogeneous) or platforms from various manufacturers (heterogeneous). ACS provides Server Access Mode (SAM) capability to allow the storage system to be optimized for response to the most popular platforms in the industry by setting the SAM.

Awards programs come and go from industry groups, publications, and other sources. What makes this series of awards unique is the grass roots nature of the balloting. The breadth of input sets this effort apart and has one speculating as to what next year's polling will bring.