InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 10, 1997
Digital Adopts Fibre Channel
StorageWorks units to be compatible with existing SCSI
Digital is stressing the compatibility of the products with existing StorageWorks subsystems that use SCSI standards. "You buy today what you need, and you won't have a forklift upgrade tomorrow," says David Coombs, Digital's VP of storage sales and marketing.
Digital will ship the fiber products to original equipment manufacturers and a few customers now, with general availability scheduled for January. Digital hasn't set pricing yet. Windows NT and Digital Unix will be the first operating systems supported, with support for OpenVMS, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, and Sun Microsystems' Solaris due later in the year. Coombs says half of his customers want a clear migration strategy for Fibre Channel, but
only 5% of them-mostly NT sites-need the bandwidth, distance, and performance now.
Greg German, assistant director of library systems for Ohio Linc, a department of the state university system in Columbus, uses Digital's existing UltraSCSI arrays. He says he'd be interested in Fibre Channel products if the price isn't outrageous, in part because it would let him separate servers and storage subsystems by more than 25 feet. "We'll especially go that road if we can maintain the rest of our infrastructure," German adds.
Thomas Lahive, a senior analyst with Dataquest, an IT market research firm in San Jose, Calif., says he thinks Digital will use Fibre Channel to exploit its other strengths. "The original benefit of Fibre Channel is a more clustered topology," he says. "Nobody else is taking advantage of the full benefit." Lahive says there's a potential fiber bottleneck when multiple nodes on an array compete for a single path. "Digital should be the first to provide network load balancing, allocating alt
ernate paths if one is full," Lahive says.
igital Equipment's StorageWorks division will announce this week its entry into the emerging market for Fibre Channel products. The unit will announce a Fibre Channel array controller, a Fibre Channel hub, and a PCI adapter.
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