In the late 90’s the concept of Storage Area Networking was introduced and was a disruptive technology where Fibre Channel was replacing traditional SCSI (now known as Direct Attached Storage). This was the first mainstream form of storage networking and used the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol.
Since 2000 the market for FC storage networking products (SAN hubs, switches, routers and directors) has consolidated from almost a dozen major players to now only 2 major players, with an additional 1 or 2 minor players hanging on.
The biggest challenge for FC SAN networks has been the duplication of the networking infrastructure within the data center (ie: the requirement to install a separate network of FC SAN switches & directors in addition to the existing infrastructure of Ethernet Switches & Directors) and the skill set requirements this puts on IT staff.
In light of these challenges, many organizations, especially small to mid-sized businesses, would never plan to implement a Storage Network.
However, the TCP/Ethernet protocols have now been expanded to be more storage friendly and this has allowed iSCSI and FCoE to become real contenders to eventually replace FC. We are starting to see converged network devices capable of FC & FCoE, or Ethernet, FC & FCoE, such as the Brocade 8000 and the Cisco Nexus 5000 series products come onto the market. These products are resold by all the major storage vendors including; DELL, EMC, IBM, HP, IBM and NetApp.
In fact, in the last 12-24 months we have seen the beginning of data center network convergence, and we expect this to continue and accelerate over the next 12-24 months.
One area of difference for the future of storage networking is in the High-end Enterprise/HPC space where we are also seeing the introduction of another disruptive technology, Infiniband. Currently this is supported internally on niche products such as Oracle’s recent Exadata V2. Other technologies on the horizon include RapidIO which has been incorporated in to the design of the EMC Symmetrix V-Max.
So what does the future hold?
1. To simplify data center networking, FC is expected to largely be replaced by iSCSI and FCoE.
2. Culminating in large scale datacenter network convergence over the next couple of years.
3. High End power users will look to emerging technologies such as Infiniband and RapidIO.
Competitive Profiles CPStorage today includes coverage of storage networking devices and as the market develops, will include coverage of the new technologies and products as they are released.
CPStorage features product specifications, part level pricing, competitive landscapes as well as support services information for these products.
Chris Ober
Vice President & Senior Analyst Storage
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Maybe the future would actually fulfill the original promise of networked storage – that due to the shareable nature, network storage can provide better economy than direct-attached storage? This promise has never realized at the infrastructure price level, and only debatably achievable at TCO level. Replacing FC with IP-based networking technologies would indeed help a lot.
Posted by: Joseph Zhou | October 20, 2009 at 04:51 PM