Veritas’s revelation comes only days before what may well be a ceBIT demonstration of a similar product from EMC that is set to ship in the second quarter.
Veritas has insisted that despite the slow sales, it is fully committed to the continuing development of VSFN. Asked whether there are any customers using VSFN in production, Veritas said only that many customers are testing VSFN, and that others are in the final stages of evaluation. When it launched the VSFN in 2003, Veritas said it expected volume uptake to be delayed for a year, or even longer.
VSFN Veritas Storage Foundation for Networks is a version of Veritas’s ubiquitous and eponymous volume manager and file system software ported to Cisco Systems’ MDS 9000 smart SAN switch. The port is intended to hugely increase the scalability of the management tools, and is part of a wider industry effort to move storage intelligence into the SAN fabric.
But VSFN faces two problems. It represents a bleeding edge technology, and is the only such product shipping from a major supplier. Secondly, the large storage suppliers that are responsible for the huge majority of SAN switch sales are not offering VSFN to their customers, because it competes with their own products.
Currently start-up Maranti Networks is the only other supplier of storage software running on a smart switch, with true port-level processing. Despite strong technical endorsements from analysts, Maranti’s product is also not yet selling well. Launched at the end of 2003, by January this year it had chalked up just five sales to three customers.
Although EMC, IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard all sell Cisco’s SAN switches, none are selling VSFN. Four months ago Storage Technology said it would soon announce a VSFN OEM deal, but has since said nothing publicly on the topic. A deal with StorageTek would not compensate for the lack of major OEM support in the SAN market, but it would help.
Cisco is poised to brief journalists on a storage announcement it will make at ceBIT next week. Quite possibly this will be a demonstration of EMC’s Storage Router migration software, which EMC has already said will ship before the summer. The Storage Router will initially run on Cisco and Brocade smart switches, with McData’s platform to follow. EMC would not comment on this speculation, but did confirm the second quarter shipping schedule.
The next smart SAN switch to ship from a major supplier is very likely to be Brocade’s Rhapsody-based Fabric Application Platform. Strictly speaking, this box is already shipping as Brocade’s Multiprotocol Router, but is not yet hosting any third-party or storage management applications. Brocade says simply that it is up to the OEMs and its software partner to decide when to launch software running on the FAP.
