At the conference Veritas demonstrated Cisco’s MDS 9000 SAN switch running a version of its Volume Manager Software, and formally announced that it will also be developing software to run on Brocade Communications Systems Inc’s smart switch rival to the MDS 9000.

The software demonstrated on the MDS 9000 is set to enter beta testing shortly, and will ship later this year, Veritas said. It will be Veritas’ first out-of-band SAN virtualization product, and represents the first public demonstration of third-party software running on the Cisco device.

The re-working of Volume Manager into a product which is to be called SAN volume manager has created a two-part out-of-band virtualization system. One part comprises a volume manager configuration engine that runs on an out-of-band appliance, and the other part comprises the run-time virtualization engine, which redirects I/O traffic. The most important thing is that you can now manage storage across the SAN, and not just on a per-host basis, said Fred Van Den Bosch, executive vice president and CTO at Veritas.

The run-time engine in SAN Volume Manager will be able to run not only on a Brocade or Cisco switch, but also on a host or application server. Here it is very likely to offer less scalability and a more complex infrastructure to manage in larger installations. It will however obviate the need to buy an expensive smart switch, and will provide a stepping stone for existing users of Veritas’ Volume manager.

A software upgrade will take users from Volume Manager to SAN Volume Manager. It will recognize existing volumes – it’s as seamless as you can get, he said.

Van Den Bosch would not say when the Veritas software will ship on the Brocade platform.

Veritas has already attempted to market an in-band virtualization system, called ServPoint SAN. Also based on Volume manager, that software failed to sell well, and is now only being offered as an OEM product. Van Den Bosch said that the product’s downfall was its in-band architecture. The customer perception was that it was adding another device in-band, he said.

Source: Computerwire