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October 11, 1999

StorageTek Products Stress Interoperability
Application suite and fibre channel switch to work with products from other vendors

By Martin J. Garvey

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ape vendor Storage Technology Corp. last week unveiled products intended to strengthen its position as a management provider in the storage area network market. The company also says it expects to seal a deal with a leading U.S. bank to deliver the architecture it will require to offer check-archiving services over the Internet to other financial institutions.

A new application suite dubbed Disk on Demand and an as-yet-unnamed intelligent Fibre Channel switch will support StorageTek products and other vendors' offerings. Disk on Demand consists of hardware, management software called LUNworks, and professional services. LUNworks lets customers move data from a failing drive, adapter, or other storage component on a SAN to a stable device before users experience any interruption in service. StorageTek says its new switch will put the intelligence for routing data among servers and storage right on the SAN, so servers and storage devices won't have to be tied up with administration tasks. StorageTek maintains an interoperability lab for testing product compatibility.

StorageTek CEO David Weiss says these offerings will let companies better manage information availability. Disk on Demand and the switch will ship by year's end. Prices have not been set.

StorageTek's strategy of embracing interoperability is a good one in an increasingly crowded storage market, says Rob Schafer, analyst and program director for Meta Group. "Customers of other storage vendors must commit themselves to that vendor's architecture-based disk storage systems," Schafer says. "StorageTek doesn't have to own the disk storage and can be moderately successful owning the management layer of the architecture."

StorageTek is unlikely to win against EMC, IBM, and other big storage players by focusing mainly on hardware, Schafer says. "It's a highly competitive arena," he says.

But Weiss says StorageTek is close to forming an alliance with a major bank to provide it with hard-disk and tape technology, as well as storage-management and retrieval software, for a new venture in which the bank will act as a service provider to other banks for financial applications such as check archiving. Weiss didn't disclose the name of the bank.

StorageTek partner Level 3 Communications Inc., which offers bandwidth on demand through a network of data centers and Fibre Channel interconnect technology, will provide the bandwidth to support the bank's applications. "Communications is catching up to storage and computing by driving cost benefits," Weiss said in an interview at StorageTek's annual user conference last week. "Applications on demand wouldn't be possible without that happening."

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