Storage: StorageTek Unveils Its Vision to Create Well-Managed, Open Networks for Storage

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, July 13, 1998

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp.) Tuesday outlined its strategy to build open storage networks with powerful management capabilities and information sharing between mainframe, UNIX and NT platforms. The company also announced the delivery of its first products for building storage area networks (SANs) as part of the new StorageNet family of offerings.

The StorageNet family being introduced today is the industry's first comprehensive product set for deploying reliable, high-speed storage area networks (SANs), StorageTek will improve application performance and shorten return on investment in storage. This reflects StorageTek's ongoing pursuit as the preeminent provider of network storage by delivering cost-effective access to information, regardless of the storage device or server platform.

The StorageNet family helps enterprise customers improve the overall performance of their business applications--the number one driver of IT spending on storage according to Gartner Group's recent customer survey--by building open storage utilities. The utility framework is designed to offload storage applications such as backup and recovery to a dedicated, managed SAN. This frees up network bandwidth for business applications, helping companies lower total cost of ownership (TCO), better meet business objectives, and gain competitive advantage.

"As competition increases, fast and reliable access to information becomes critical to a business' success," said David E. Weiss, StorageTek chairman, president and chief executive officer. "StorageTek is leading the movement to building reliable, manageable SANs for an efficient storage utility. And, unlike the competition, we have chosen to be completely open, supporting information access between all hardware platforms and any storage device."

Much as water, and phone utility companies must serve customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, StorageTek is committed to offering unprecedented levels of storage service. To deliver the required service, StorageNet leverages its world-class leadership in tape libraries, disk subsystems and connectivity for mainframe, UNIX and NT systems, as well as its Solutions Business Group for professional services and worldwide support organization. This is augmented by its three decades of high availability storage and networking experience and key partnerships.

In contrast to open SANs, "captive" storage is managed by general-purpose file servers and prevents customers from scaling their tape or disk systems independent of the processor to accommodate data growth. StorageTek's open architecture embraces heterogeneous environments and places software management capabilities out in the SAN. This delivers tremendous TCO advantages while supporting the trend toward server recentralization so that customers can optimize limited and costly administration resources in the data center.

Fibre Channel Is a Key Enabler of the Open Storage Utility StorageTek's SAN solutions are high-available, high performance dedicated networks for critical storage-centric applications that are enabled and managed today by Fibre Channel-based devices. Fibre Channel, a proven connectivity technology between servers and storage or storage and storage, delivers high-speed, high-capacity throughput of up to 100 megabytes (MB) per second; 2.5 times that of traditional SCSI connections. It also lets users physically separate servers from storage by up to 10,000 meters, or more than 300 times the distance of SCSI. These capabilities have prompted industry-watcher EMF Associates to predict that the Fibre Channel market for hubs, routers and switches will grow to a US$1 billion industry by 2002.

Standards are still evolving in this area, and StorageTek is dedicated to working through organizations such as the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC) and the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) to drive standards and develop technologies that align with standards-based frameworks.

The breadth of StorageTek's Fibre Channel product offerings is unique in the industry, and provides a one-stop-shop for an integrated set of open solutions that can easily be tailored to fit the needs of entry-level to enterprise-level SAN customers. To take full advantage of high-speed SANs, StorageTek also offers its complementary line of OPENstorage systems for end-to-end native Fibre Channel disk connectivity.

Initially, the StorageNet family of Fibre Channel connectivity products for building SANs consists of:

* StorageNet Fibre Channel Hub 1000 (now shipping): This seven-port device is the basic SAN building block for deploying high-speed, high-bandwidth Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loops (FC-ALs).

* StorageNet Fibre Channel Bridge 3100 (now shipping): The Bridge 3100 preserves investments in legacy SCSI tape and disk devices with SCSI-to-Fibre connectivity as customers build Fibre Channel SANs.

* StorageNet Fibre Channel Switch 4000 (announced separately by StorageTek today; now shipping): With this product, StorageTek becomes the first storage vendor to offer a highly-scalable, full-bandwidth Fibre Channel fabric for the most demanding enterprise SAN environments. The 16- port Switch 4000 ships with a Web-based management interface and provides high-end access control and performance management capabilities.