SNW: Users see storage technology maturing

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