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SNW: Users see storage technology maturing
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October 24, 2005 (Computerworld) -- 
ORLANDO -- Users and experts at Storage Networking World said today that technology promises made by vendors in recent years are finally becoming a reality, yielding tools that consolidate storage, use Internet Protocol to create storage-area networks (SAN) and create tiers for better data management at lower costs.
Greg Schulz, an analyst at the Evaluator Group in Englewood, Colo., said technologies such as disk-to-disk backup are being used to facilitate rapid data recovery and rapid restoration. And continuous data protection is now being used to improve recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives in mainstream environments.
"The theme is delivering on past hype; there's real content there. [With] storage virtualization ... the market is shifting from a discretionary 'want to have' spend to a 'need to have,' " Schulz said. "Whether it's down in the server, in the network or in the storage system; it's a shift in market. There aren't that many start-ups anymore in storage virtualization."
Another past promise from vendors now seeing rapid adoption is the use of Internet SCSI or Ethernet to create substorage networks.
Kyle Ohme, director of IT at Freeze.com LLC in Waite Park, Minn., said his company implemented an iSCSI SAN over the past year and a half that has allowed him to tie together Web serving and file applications across a single storage infrastructure. The architecture, which currently serves his company's main data center, will be rolled out to another half-dozen or so data centers throughout the U.S. during the next year.
"ISCSI's cheap. We can ship out a blade center, an [iSCSI storage] box and do all the configuration prior [to shipping]," said Ohme, who is using iSCSI switches and host bus adapters from QLogic Corp. in Aliso Viejo, Calif. Ohme also uses middleware from Sanbolic Inc. in Watertown, Mass., to create a shared file system across his IBM blade server infrastructure and 8TB of storage capacity on two network-attached storage arrays from BlueArc Corp. in San Jose.
Before the iSCSI implementation, Ohme said he'd had complexity issues with Fibre Channel -- especially with connecting multiple switches in a storage environment. "We were always sending someone down to the data center," he said.
Now Ohme is looking for backup technology at the SNW show that would allow him to perform multiple backups to a single site from his six remote data centers, possibly via a virtual tape library.
David Hussain, information systems director at Cardinal Health Systems Inc. in Muncie, Ind., said he has a three-phase mission: consolidate storage systems, find a data replication technology and develop a business continuity system. "I'm having a hard time getting to the first phase because of the cost. I may not get to replication because of that," he said.
Hussain said he hopes virtualization will help him consolidate his two SANs -- one made up of EMC Clariion arrays and the other of Hewlett-Packard Co. EVA arrays -- in order to reduce the cost and complexity of his back-end systems.
He said the hospital industry as a whole is "all over the place" when it comes to storage because it's trying to digitize everything from patient records and radiology to billing. Hussain said he's tired of being locked in to using only one storage vendor, especially when buying a half-dozen terabytes of storage from a company such as EMC Corp. can cost more than $100,000. He wants to ease management issues and add less expensive disk systems into his SAN.
"Whether I have Sun or IBM or whatever storage I have, I'm trying to bring them all together and reduce the costs," Hussain said.
He also said he doesn't believe that virtualization can erase interoperability issues in multivendor storage architectures. "Everyone's saying we can work with everyone else, but they're just sales people. I need to investigate it further, and if it doesn't fit, I need to go back and see what I can have with this island of storage or that island of storage," he said.
SNW is sponsored by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association and runs through Thursday.
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