What's in store? - Brief Article

Electronics Times, Oct 2, 2000

Nolan Fell looks at meeting the needs for petabyte data storage in the digital age and IBM's solution - the storage area network

The shift from analogue to digital is creating a great demand for data storage. To meet this demand, new forms of networks, designed to cope with petabyte data volumes, are being developed.

According to a Dataquest analysis, Storage Utility Market Accelerators, by 2003 more than 1200 petabytes of memory storage will have been purchased. The market for digital storage is accelerating and Dataquest has indicated a number of drivers.

These include the need to meet cyclical capacity requirements without needing additional storage infrastructure; the costs associated with managing the data; the disruption to networks caused by transferring large volumes of data; the lack of technological standards; the applicability of managed storage services to venture capital start-ups and the emergence of e-business.

At IBC2000, where companies demonstrated the latest in broadcasting technology, IBM presented its storage area network (san), designed to meet the immense data storage needs that the digitisation of broadcasting implies.

Juan de Zulueta, IBM director of san solutions, said: "The media will become the largest customer of data storage within two years."

Traditionally TV and film companies have stored their archive material on film or video tape. Any established company has to put aside a considerable amount of space to house the material.

Transferring old material to digital form and creating and editing new product using digital technology is creating a huge demand for storage in the television and film businesses. This need is increased further by the development of Internet related business - the development of video and audio on demand.

For e-business companies the need for data storage is just as great - their data is their main asset. Demand is also emerging in the telecoms and banking sectors.

IBM's solution, sans, concentrate a company's data storage into a central facility. The development could represent a shift in data management following a decade where decentralisation has been the dominant force. But the shift to a purely digital environment changes the nature of the information being stored electronically.

"Keeping central control of petabytes of information keeps management costs down," said de Zulueta. "There is a hierarchy, though. You don't need to install 3Pbyte straight away."

IBM's san model involves a modular development designed to keep investment costs in line with a company's data storage needs.

IBM describes its san as a `smart storage device', capable of carrying out basic data movement and back-up functions without tying up server processing resources. This is made possible through the use of embedded computers within the storage facility and within the fibre channels connecting them.

Historically, computer architectures have been built on the basis that storage devices were `owned' by the computers. To get the data you had to open up the specific computer on which it was stored, either directly or through an internal network. A san shifts much of this functionality to the storage device itself.

The san technology is based on data rates through optical transfer of 100Mbyte/s. IBM claims it has the ability to establish connections at this data rate as much as 100km apart. The san architecture is also designed to connect any file system, such as OS/390, OS/400, Unix or NT, with any other one.

Jacob Burger, a san consultant, said: "In order to form a san you need switches. The basic structure is a fibre channelled arbitrated loop - comparable to an ordinary Ethernet. IBM does not make the hubs or switches; it buys equipment from companies such as Brokade. "As more and more devices enter the network the number of servers and stored data will grow and in the long run 100Mbyte bandwidth will not be enough."

IBM describes the san system as "a kind of data bus - a virtual plug in the wall to which you connect your server or your data controller".

As the system develops sans will be able to manage large networks of heterogeneous servers as well as allowing servers to connect to a common `fibre fabric'. The shifting of smart functions into the data storage device will allow the san to carry out `message passing'. It will be possible to send an object-like message to a storage device and say `copy yourself' or `back yourself up'.

This offers simplified data management throughout a company spread through a number of geographic locations. A common methodology to periodically back up all critical files on a central site is possible.

IBM is not the only company providing data storage on the petabyte scale for broadcasters. Managed Storage International (MSI), a company spun off from StorageTek and launched in March this year, was also at IBC promoting its content management services. More specifically broadcast focused, MSI demonstrated video archiving and retrieval services.

MSI claims to offers virtually unlimited disk and tape storage capacity on the Internet, as well as server back-up and information management services. The company operates a three-tier server architecture, including control servers that manage authentication and billing, shared servers that store files common to different subscribers and private servers.