Ibm Builds Bridge From Internet To San With New Storage Products - IBM TotalStorage IP Storage 200i and IBM TotalStorage Networked Attached Storage 300G - Product Announcement

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, March 5, 2001

IBM has announced a new portfolio of products and technology -- including an in iSCSI network storage appliance -- all designed to lead the industry's rapid migration to open storage networking.

The initiative delivers on IBM's commitment to create, through customer-focused solutions, interoperable storage technologies that leverage the function yet reduce the complexity of Storage Area Networks (SANs). They are designed to help customers manage the explosive growth of data and the resulting need to have faster, flexible, universal access to that data.

"As e-business and the Internet move storage from the back room to the heart of the IT network, customers are looking to take the islands of storage they have built and create interoperable, open storage networks, be it within a single department or a worldwide enterprise," said Linda Sanford, senior vice-president & group executive, IBM Storage Systems Group. "With customers increasingly moving to storage networking, IBM is better positioned than ever to lead the industry and expedite this significant business transformation."

IBM's storage networking initiative includes:

* The industry's first open NAS Gateway, IBM TotalStorage Networked Attached Storage 300G, which allows Local Area Network (LAN)-based clients and servers to easily interoperate with an existing Storage Area Network (SAN), leveraging the features and performance of a SAN with the ease and convenience of a NAS product.

* The IBM TotalStorage IP Storage 200i, a high-performance, low-cost iSCSI storage appliance that connects users to pooled storage on a network using Internet protocols. iSCSI delivers complete storage functionality for departments/workgroups, mid-market customers and service providers.

* Customer-focused solutions, including the introduction of prepackaged storage networking products, designed to help businesses of all sizes more easily take advantage of the opportunities the SAN environment offers.

IBM is bringing a new product offering to the market that converges Ethernet/IP networks and (SANs). The Network Attached Storage (NAS) 300G is a highly-tuned file server that resides between the local area network (LAN) and a storage area network (SAN). From the client/server side on the LAN, these products appear as a NAS device, serving multi-protocol files, yet its storage resides on the SAN. This capability enables customers to leverage their investments in SAN infrastructure, skills and tools, and reap the benefits of NAS including simplicity, quick deployment cycles, reduced cost of access, and heterogeneous data sharing.

The IBM NAS 300G series was designed as an open system able to work with multiple storage systems. Many NAS vendors offer a closed file system that only attaches to dedicated internal or proprietary storage. However, the IBM NAS 300G series can be used with a variety of external storage products that reside on the SAN, including IBM products such as the IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS, codenamed Shark), the IBM Modular Storage Server, and the IBM 7133. This sets the 300G series apart from any other NAS gateway -- particularly the EMC Celerra which enables SAN connectivity only with its proprietary Symmetrix unit -- because it has the ability to incorporate different storage systems devices on the SAN to provide significant storage scalability to IP-based clients and servers.

"The IBM NAS gateway technology allows us to empower our existing AIX users with the ability to extend their enterprise data management by upgrading their existing disk technology to a SAN and use the gateway to provide critical file services to their customers," said Mike Piltoff, vice president, Champion Computer Corporation.