October 2, 2000

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Storage Area Networks
Everything In Its Own Place

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HighGround Helps Users Manage And Control Storage (9/25/00) InternetWeek: Enterprise Storage (9/25/00)

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We caused a number of other failures on the SAN, ranging from unplugging GigaBit Interface Converters, devices used to attach network devices to fiber-based transmission systems, to turning off one of the parallel SAN switches. After a pause of less than five seconds, the MA8000 recovered and kept operating each time.

The breadth and depth of manageability of the MA8000 were also impressive. The system can be administered through Compaq Insight Manager using applications launched either from within Insight Manager or running separately, but whose alerts and reports can be monitored by Insight Manager.

Overall, control of the MA8000 controller is handled by a Windows NT/ 2000 agent, Command Console, which must run on a server or workstation directly connected to the SAN. Command Console can be administered through either a graphical or command-line interface directly on the machine hosting the agent or via a Win32 graphical application running out-of-band on the Ethernet network.

The Command Console application not only reports on the SAN's health, but is also the tool used to configure LUNs, global hot spares, and otherwise administer the storage system. A separate utility is required to manage the SAN switches.

There's no central management of the SecurePath failover utility, so it must be configured separately for each server on the SAN, although it can report via SNMP if a failover takes place or if a spare pathway goes down.

The MA8000 SAN does it all with high reliability, scalability, and even interoperability with Sun's Solaris. It's relatively expensive, but there's no doubt that it works and works well.

We're also very impressed with the level of multivendor support that Interphase demonstrates with its product--the only products bearing the company's own name are its innovative Gigabit Ethernet/Fibre Chan-nel card and its FibreView software. The flip side is that the management software isn't comprehensive and the automatic failover features aren't complete.

The first link in the SAN was Interphase's impressive 5570 SlotOptimizer host bus adapter, which provides Gigabit Ethernet and SCSI-over-Fibre Channel ports on a single 66-MHz, 64-bit PCI card. For systems with few slots to spare, full LAN and SAN connectivity would only take a single PCI slot--and a fully redundant product would take only two slots.

For our test, Interphase didn't build a redundant Fibre Channel SAN. The cards are inserted into a four-way Compaq ProLiant DL580 running Windows 2000, a dual-processor ProLiant DL380 running Linux, and a Dell PowerEdge 4400 running Windows 2000, brought by Interphase. Because the 5570 card was scheduled to begin shipping a few weeks after the test's completion, Interphase used beta drivers for our test.

The Gigabit Ethernet part of the host bus adapters are connected to an Alteon Systems' 180 switch, which provides IP for the test. The Fibre Channel part is initially connected to an eight-port Vixel 7100 series Fibre Channel fabric switch; after the testing was complete, Interphase swapped a SANBox-8 switch from Ancor Communications Inc., now part of QLogic, to demonstrate interoperability.

Storage on the SAN is provided by two Storagepath SP-8BFC storage systems from SWS Corp., each of which contains eight 18-Gbyte Fibre Channel drives. There was tape backup, too: a 108-Gbyte-per-second Mammoth 2 SCSI tape drive from Exabyte Corp. bridged to the Fibre Channel switch via a 4200 SCSI-to-FC router from Crossroads Systems Inc.

The software driving the product ranged from Interphase's own Java-based FibreView Enterprise software for managing the host bus adapters to Legato Systems Inc.'s NetWorker for administering storage to Tivoli Systems Inc.'s SANergy for providing shared access to SAN volumes and application failover. Each of the switch manufacturers had software for managing its switch: Ancor's SAN Surfer and Vixel Corp.'s SAN InSite.

The Interphase testing went off without a hitch and passed nearly all our test requirements: showing heterogeneous servers playing multiple video streams while also performing file transfers and restoring a backup to another SAN volume with the Exabyte tape drive. Overall, it's a solid performance.

As mentioned earlier, Interphase didn't perform a failover test. According to the company, that's because its current host bus adapter drivers don't yet offer this feature; auto-failover support is expected in the fall.

Of course, a SAN means more than hardware. In a real-world deployment, it must also be manageable. Each of the products that makes up the Interphase offering contains its own management software optimized for a specific task.

Interphase's FibreView Enterprise, which we spent the most time with, is a comprehensive and easy-to-use Win32-based package for centrally managing host bus adapters and the nodes of the Fibre Channel network. The IP-based software works out-of-band over the Ethernet network, not Fibre Channel.

Interphase demonstrates reasonably tight coupling between FibreView Enterprise and Vixel's SAN InSite software; SAN InSite could launch FibreView, and some alerts from FibreView could roll up into SAN InSite. Still, it would be a mistake to call the packages integrated; there are just some interprocess communication between them. Management-software connectivity between FibreView Enterprise and Ancor's SAN Surfer application is missing, although according to Interphase officials, such integration is planned for the future.

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