OSNI Puts FC's Feet To The Fire.

Interoperability more urgent than ever

A crowded room at the Las Vegas Hilton formed a backdrop for the announcement of a new initiative emphasizing open standards and threatening to severely limit the future role of Fibre Channel technology in storage networking architectures such as Storage Area Networking. Network Appliance and Quantum/ATL jointly announced the formation of the Open Storage Networking (OSN) initiative, along with Amdahl, Cisco Systems, Foundry Networks, Legato Systems, and Veritas Software. OSN is designed to accelerate the adoption of "truly open storage networking solutions and further the maturity, management capability, and performance of current and future storage network architectures."

The initiative's architecture is expected to enable computer servers, storage appliances, automated tape libraries, and network switching equipment to combine seamlessly into enterprise-class systems and ensure data is accessible anywhere via industry standard networks and that it is replicated, protected, and easily brought back online in the event of a disaster. By using industry standard data management protocols such as NDMP the architecture is designed for interoperability in a multi-vendor data server environment.

In addition, the storage networking architecture is designed to leverage the existing investment that organizations have made in networking and storage equipment, personnel, applications software, systems and storage management tools, and security. Within 18 months, the initiative members expect to increase bandwidth with the successful deployment of 10Gb Ethernet.

"OSN delivers on the promise of storage networking today with existing standards, technologies, interoperability, and multi-vendor support," said Mark Santora at Network Appliance. "Customers have been waiting for storage networking to materialize. OSN makes it real, easy to deploy and manage, and available immediately."

SAN Implementation Delays

The wait that Santora references likely refers to the slow adoption of SANs in the IT community. The pacing issues are considerable. Enterprise Management Associates, who does market studies in this space, recently reported that a recent survey identified the top two problems interrupting SAN purchases and implementations: high implementation costs and shortage of staff and other resources. The high price of SAN equipment and software chokes deployment, as does lack of personnel and financial resources.

EMA also reported: "The absence of standards is also hampering the selection and purchase of SAN equipment, according to 27% of respondents. 18 percent complained that product interoperability issues were slowing down their deployment of SAN technology." Some observers point to the inability of FC switches to communicate at the interswitch link level as a key inhibitor.

The OSN vision is very much a networking vision, focusing on the use of network standards to spur deployment.

Soni Jiandani at Cisco Systems noted in a written statement: "The OSN initiative mirrors a core Cisco value delivery of open, standardsbased systems, like Gigabit Ethernet and IP, that provides customers with the flexibility to create the network architecture best suited to their changing needs."

The announcement takes place after Cisco and IBM submitted an IP specification to the IETF standards body.

Sign Of The Times

Major vendors and startups alike are moving onto the Ethernet and IP bandwagons, both within and without the new OSNI consortium. At the beginning of May, Adaptec announced EtherStorage. This new technology enables blockbased storage traffic to be efficiently and reliably transferred over existing IP and Ethernetbased networks and is the result of over two years of research and development at Adaptec on future storage fabric architectures. The company sees it as a major step forward in bringing the benefits of SANs to a broader market because EtherStorage leverages the existing Ethernet infrastructure and provides storage levels of performance.

"IT managers are rapidly embracing SANs as the solution for managing exploding storage capacity and solving backup issues. Fibre Channel has really caught on," said Robert Gray, research director of Storage Systems at International Data Corporation. "The next market expansion phase depends on reaching the broader market. Adaptec's EtherStorage, with significantly lower price points and familiar Ethernet foundation, is a complementary inter-connect technology. We believe EtherStorage will accelerate SAN adoption in price-sensitive segments of the market."

The EtherStorage technology is focused on bringing new storage fabric technologies and external storage products to market. Storage fabric solutions are designed to offer users a lower cost of management, increased data availability, and higher levels of performance and scalability. It retains all the existing networking, interoperability, manageability, compatibility, and cost advantages that have made Ethernet so successful because EtherStorage runs over Ethernet and IP. Customers will now be able to use inexpensive, readily available Ethernet switches, hubs, and cables to implement low cost, low risk, EtherStorage-based SANs. This is as an alternative to the more expensive FC solutions.

Computer Network Technology (CNT) announced SAN over IP (Storage Area Network over Internet Protocol). SAN over IP enables companies to build storage infrastructures over IP-based networks such as intranets and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). This technology is the latest innovation in CNT's strategy to enable SANs to operate across campus, metropolitan, and long haul networks using a variety of open architectures and technologies such as IP, ATM, and optical networks.

SAN over IP links localized SAN "islands" to create an enterprise-wide SAN. CNT's UltraNet Open Systems Director delivers SAN over IP through the industry's first "Fibre Channel over IP" and "SCSI over IP" capabilities. The UltraNet Open Systems Director is a high-speed dynamic switching platform for storage networks, which also contains I-Stor, the CNT software that adds the needed security for data transport on IP networks. CNT's I-Stor provides enhanced storage application reliability on an IP backbone, along with data compression, alternate routing, load balancing, and enhanced flow control.

"The ability to perform storage applications over IP has huge implications for the entire market," said Steve Duplessie, an analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group, a storage research/analyst firm. "Using the IP backbone means wide-area access now has the same feel as local, which will change the way people think about storage. The implications for wide area clustering, disaster recovery, and business continuance are enormous."

Fibre Channel deployment is increasing, CNT executives relate, yet customers must deal with an enormous installed base of existing servers and storage devices that use SCSI interfaces. Further, the single largest cost factor in remote SANs is the cost of communications bandwidth. IP networks have become the preferred data connection today and the least expensive communications alternative on the planet, yet it has been inadequate to handle the quality of service, the data security needs or the bandwidth on demand needs of storage applications.

Here Comes Nishan!

Waiting in the wings and preparing for the spotlight, Nishan Systems announced that it would revolutionize the SAN market by creating a complete end-to-end solution based on IP and Gigabit Ethernet. Nishan and its partners will introduce Storage over IP (SoIP), in which the startup hopes to combine the best features of first-generation SANs--high availability and performance--with the best features of IP networks--product compatibility, established standards, and scalability.

SoIP will leverage the unprecedented improvements in the IP infrastructure itself and provide vendor interoperability, an unrealized goal that continues to elude current SAN offerings. In addition to serving the traditional enterprise and service provider customer segments, SoIP also will help develop an entirely new type of service--online storage.

"Every once in a while, a company has an idea that changes an entire industry," said Aamer Latif, president and CEO at Nishan Systems. "SoIP is an idea that will completely transform the storage networking industry."

By integrating storage with IP, Nishan and the other SoIP companies will allow enterprises and service providers to use their expertise in designing and managing IP networks to solve the exploding storage access problem. Until now, widespread SAN adoption has been curtailed by proprietary implementations.

"With the advent of SoIP, we and our partners will enable the broad deployment of SANs," Latif continued.

Where Is Prime Time?

One of the possible consequences of this new approach is the relegation of Fibre Channel technology to a sort of SCSI replacement. The IP and GE vendors are likely to press three buttons successfully. The first obvious button is cost ... new SAN owners face a significant investment in setting up a FC infrastructure. The offer of familiar, cost effective use of Ethernet is a siren song to financially constrained IT management. The second button is interoperability. There is little likelihood that FC switch vendors will begin to cooperate on interswitch communications, whereas GE and IP already communicate. The third button is openness.

The Nishan CEO said it well: "Until now, widespread SAN adoption has been curtailed by proprietary implementations."

FC's advantage in this space is that the solutions are here and now with a fully fleshed product suite. Further, IT management will, in fact, make an investment in SANs, even proprietary SANs, so long as the solution works.

In any event, the OSNI announcement and the product offerings are likely to ease some of the hesitation that IT management has entertained regarding SANs and, of course, as Quantum/ATL's Kevin Daly says: "The OSNI partners are bringing balance to the industry. OSN is a practical solution, but not necessarily for everyone."

The industry must realize, though, that balance and harmony are not at all the same thing.