Storage Technology Inc is set to announce the first of a promised set of ready packaged applications for storage area networks next Monday. The first of its SANaps suite of products, covering off- LAN backup, will be available within two months. The second, for capacity management, is due to appear before the end of the year.
StorageTek says it has been deploying SANs for some months now, to customers such as the Mirage Resorts chain of hotels and Online Computer Library Center Inc, and says it based its product schedule on the problems customers most needed a fix for. Phase one of the project, taking the backup traffic from the LAN, lessens the impact of backup on the main system. The LanFree Backup 1.0 application enables switched tape storage pools, so that, transparently to the client, tape connections can be tuned to the backup process and can be run either in sequence or in parallel. Less overall spare drives are needed. StorageTek will supply everything but the server, including hubs, tape libraries and services, for a base price of $150,000. It says the price is no more than the cost of the separate parts.
Phase two will cover capacity expansion, aiming to help customers with the impact of configuration changes. StorageTek claims it will be the first integrated system for managing heterogeneous SAN-attached disks. New storage will be able to be added without downtime, and there will be a single spare storage pool for multiple heterogeneous servers. Beyond that comes phase three, where the company plans to offer software to help customers utilize the distance extensions offered by fibre channel, for remote storage setups and disaster recovery.
Software company partners such as SCH Technologies Inc (for LANfree Backup), Computer Associates International Inc, Legato Software Inc and Veritas Corp, and networking hardware firms Brocade Communications Inc, Crossroads Systems Inc, JNI Inc (formerly Jaycor Networks Inc) and Vixel Corp, have all agreed to modify their products to fit in with the scheme. StorageTek, a prime mover behind Monday’s announcement of a new SAN standards effort centered around the Storage Network Industry Association, says its new products use only open systems technologies.
