InformationWeek

October 20, 1997

Enterprise Computing: High-Fiber Storage

Fibre Channel is changing the face of storage�and attracting big-name vendors

he debate over what will be the next generation of storage infrastructure is over. For at least the next few years, the industry is banking on Fibre Channel to be the basis of fast, flexible storage systems that will become an increasingly strategic part of enterprise computing.

The shift to Fibre Channel is also expected to usher in fierce competition as more vendors use the technology transition to position themselves as cross-platform storage suppliers. It will also bring on new storage architectures that will make it easier to pull data from multiple sources at high speeds.

Fibre Channel will deliver more than just raw speed. It will also play a big role in a major industry shift to storage area networks-specialized switched networks that link multiple servers with multiple storage systems. "With a storage area network, I can have a pool of servers and a pool of storage devices," says Fred True, senior technical manager at AT&T's home-consumer and small-business division in Piscataway, N.J. A storage network will make data from any disk array accessible to any server at gigabit speeds.

Storage area networks raise the issue of how to ensure that servers and storage from multiple vendors can communicate. Representatives from major storage vendors met last week in San Francisco to form the Storage Networking Industry Association and start hammering out a plan for standards and market development of the new technologies.

Fibre Channel, which till now has accounted for only a tiny fraction of the overall storage ma rket, is primed to take off, with big vendors, including Compaq Computer, EMC, IBM, and Storage Technology, unveiling product plans. "Fibre is getting stable enough, and expertise strong enough, that major vendors are leaping in," says Michael Peterson, senior analyst with Strategic Research Corp. in Santa Barbara, Calif.

On Nov. 10, Compaq is expected to lay out plans for Fibre Channel drives, subsystems, hubs, and switches. It plans to start shipping enterprise-level Fibre Channel-attached storage next quarter at PC-class prices: about 30 cents per megabyte.

Next week, Sun Microsystems will announce its second-generation Fibre Channel products, including the Enterprise Network Array A5000, adding end-to-end support for the technology from server to disk drives. It scales to 20 terabytes.

EMC plans to formally announce Fibre Channel connectivity for various servers by year's end; it's already quietly shipping drives with Fibre Channel connectivity to Hewlett-Packard for integration with HP se rvers.

Removing Limitations
Initially, Fibre Channel will be used mainly to provide fast links between high-end servers and large disk arrays. Today, those links are based mainly on tried-and-tested SCSI technology; Fibre Channel will remove SCSI's distance limitations and deliver more than three times the bandwidth, boosting performance in server clusters and applications such as data warehousing. "We're interested in Fibre Channel technology for throughput and performance with our large databases," says Anne Gockel, assistant director of systems administration for the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) in Rockville, Md.

Analysts expect increased competition as vendors aim to become cross-platform storage providers- and users increasingly opt to buy their storage from one vendor and share it across all their servers, rather than treating storage as an add-on. "People are starting to decouple storage from the server," says Anders Lofgren, a senior analyst with Giga Informat ion Group, an IT advisory firm in Cambridge, Mass.

The cross-platform approach helped EMC become a top storage player; now, Sun Microsystems has started positioning itself as a cross-platform storage provider, though it hasn't yet delivered Fibre Channel products. Compaq is dropping hints that it may do the same.

The reason for vendors' interest isn't just users' appetite for storage. The vendors also see a chance to become more-strategic suppliers-many users are more likely to switch servers than to move all their data to new storage architecture. "Sun, for one, knows the war we're in is the war of who owns the data," says Strategic Research's Peterson.

Some Sun users say the company's technology is impressive. AT&T's True, who manages 20 large servers and more than 8 terabytes of data, tested Sun's A5000 array and plans to buy it. "Pushing around all that data," he says, "we need to maximize input-output."

Storage area networks will require switches to direct data between servers and storage arrays; vendors are developing those switches, but they're not yet generally available. Jim Rothnie, EMC's senior VP, says that within a year EMC will be able to connect multiple arrays with servers via a Fibre Channel switch.

The potential of storage area networks is attracting endorsements even from vendors that have been reluctant to support Fibre Channel.

"Fibre Channel has tremendous strengths for storage area networks," says Bill Pinkerton, IBM's director of worldwide marketing for open systems storage. "In the second quarter of next year, we'll take the performance strengths of SSA [Serial Storage Architecture, IBM's fast proprietary disk drives] and merge them with the connectivity fabric of Fibre Channel."

No one expects Fibre Channel to take over the entire storage market. Analysts say that although this technology will spread rapidly as a way to link servers and storage arrays, SCSI will still be the dominant technology used to connect individual drives in low-end systems an d within arrays.

Expect a crescendo of Fibre Channel product rollouts, though. Besides the Sun and Compaq announcements, Data General this week will announce servers with Fibre Channel interfaces; StorageTek last week announced its first disk subsystem to use the technology.

Keen Interest
NASD is interested in Fibre Channel from EMC, in part because of EMC's ability to share data among multiple servers. "We want the flexibility to move between Sequent, Sun, and Windows NT," says Sam Laughery, VP of production services for NASD.

Ken Graham, CIO at staffing firm Romac International, also has high hopes for the technology. He says some massively parallel systems already derive some of their scalability from using Fibre Channel. Now, the technology is maturing for symmetric multiprocessing servers.

"The speed offered with Fibre Channel is something that SMP systems need," Graham says. With the industry rushing to support the technology, users are not likely to be deprived of that s peed for long.

With additional reporting by Mary Hayes and Bob Francis

See related story: " Fast, Flexible Fibre Channel "

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