SAN Appliances: Enabling Media Rich Internet Storage Networks - Technology Information

Computer Technology Review, August, 2000 by Robert Woolery

The promise of the Internet is being unlocked. With massive bandwidth and storage capacities readily available and desktop computers, PDAs, cell phones, and TVs linked like never before, second-generation Internet applications are poised to harness the potential of worldwide data access. Led by streaming media, interactive e-business, and content delivery, these next generation Internet applications promise to bring real world data to individuals and workgroups to make the Internet an indispensable part of life. Yet before users embrace ubiquitous data access, Quality of Service and "user experience" must equal that delivered by over-air or cable systems.

These requirements for Quality of Service (QoS) and user experience are forcing a revolution in Internet, as well as corporate infrastructures. Consequently, streaming media and content delivery companies, as well as Fortune 500 and "brick and mortar" firms, are developing next generation infrastructures, specifically "core-edge" deployments. With this distributed peer-to-peer topology, firms can bring content closer to the user, increasing the quality of user experience and customer interaction (Fig 1).

Network architects and storage professionals designing these next-generation infrastructures are looking to Storage Area Networks (SANs) to play a critical role in meeting these QoS demands as they create "content-centric" Internet Storage Networks (ISNs). More specifically, these Internet Storage Networks are looking at the positive impact that "disruptive" SAN technologies can bring to their operations.

This "core-edge" transaction/content management design allows for one-to-one trust relationships enabled by SANs. A distributed peer-to-peer high-bandwidth Internet Storage Network infrastructure would provide:

* High-performance Internet content delivery.

* High I/O connectivity enabling e-commerce.

* QoS without performance loss.

* Fortress-like security.

* Scalable shared resources.

* Uninterrupted user interaction.

* Reduced network and storage costs.

* Reduced acquisition, implementation, and operating costs.

* Critical data monitoring, reporting, and analysis.

"Core-edge" infrastructure deployments were conceived to meet the explosive growth and demands of streaming media, as well as interactive e-business and content delivery, but implementation has proven to be a challenge. Internet content, more specifically media-rich content, covers a tremendous range of file sizes, formats, and performance requirements. Changing from a traditional mix of text and numbers to one that now includes images, sound, and video has rendered current network storage technology outdated. Consequently, content delivery and other IT professionals are faced with the prospect of creating infrastructures using earlier, outdated technology that is difficult and costly to customize for their specific and typically wide-ranging data delivery requirements.

We need to explore the concept of network storage and data accessibility through its evolutionary progression to meet the needs of streaming media and content delivery. We need to explore creating a high bandwidth flexible infrastructure that pools, shares, and scales resources enabling a next generation infrastructure, while reducing acquisition, implementation, and operation costs. We must recognize that if "brick and mortar," "click and order," or streaming media enterprises are to be successful, they will need to access data from a variety of storage media and stage it on the edge of the Internet at high-speeds without degrading QoS.

Media-Rich Internet Storage Networks

Internet Storage Networks have been conceived to meet the tremendous growth and demands of e-commerce, streaming media, data mining, and online transaction processing. These factors are the driving force behind petabyte-class core data repositories and multi-terabyte edge sites that more than double in size every quarter. As stated before, the nature of this data has changed from text and numbers to now include images, sound, and video. This data explosion and change of data has altered how worldwide infrastructures deliver data--elevating the management, sharing, distribution, and protection needs of storage infrastructures--while the heterogeneity of storage and server hardware places even further demands on the IT professionals charged with managing these resources. With this new mix of data in a large, non-deterministic distributed world, the classic Fibre Channel and SCSI direct-attached storage, "hands-off" proprietary closed systems, and Ethernet Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions have reached th eir limits in scalability, performance, connectivity, and management capability.

Roadblocks

Web architects and Internet administrators face a myriad of potential roadblocks in implementation content-centric infrastructures with "hands-off' proprietary closed systems and Ethernet Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. For example, with "hands-off' multi-million dollar closed systems, flexibility, scalability, and performance are expensive and limited. Once a system is installed you must receive permission or wait for service to move or re-purpose a system. Scalability means vendor lock-in, purchasing commodity components at a premium price. Performance means adding expensive systems to deliver the number of simultaneous streams needed to adequately deliver content.