The jury is still out on whether Data General Corp’s decision to leapfrog UltraSCSI and implement a full fibre storage solution where the both front end (controller to server) and backend (controller to drives) provide fibre channel support. The delayed introduction of a crucial controller element hampered the roll- out of its storage to OEMs who needed to integrate the controller into their servers to support the new disk subsystems. DG’s Fibre Channel model is different from that of rival EMC Corp, which only implements Fibre Channel at the front-end, not all the way to disk. DG told Merrill Lynch & Co that it disagrees with EMC’s assertion that 90% of the benefit of fibre channel is in the host connection. Fibre Channel, it told the brokerage, when compared to its SCSI predecessor, provides greater bandwidth (100Mb per second going to 200Mbps versus 80Mbps), longer distances between server and storage (up to 10km versus 25 feet), and greater storage capacity (126 disk drives versus 16). Moreover DG believes that 40-50% of the value of fibre channel is in the fibre channel disk drive. On the other hand EMC believes that the new fibre channel disk drives are not stable enough to use in mission-critical environments; the company continues to ship SCSI disk drives instead. Seagate remains the only supplier of Fibre Channel disks though IBM products are expected to come on stream in the fall. Hitachi and Fujitsu also have Fibre Channel products on the runway. Fibre Channel drives, DG tells Merrill Lynch, allow users to purchase smaller configurations initially, adding banks of 10 disk drives and additional controllers as needed in contrast to less granularity offered by SCSI. It also claims fibre channel drives have much simpler cabling and a redundant data port that provides an alternate path in case of a failure. The company told the brokerage it expects to support data partitioning on a Clariion storage system next year but believes the full end-to-end Fibre Channel model is three years away from general implementation. Until then DG and others will provide intermediate solutions that use proprietary fibre channel protocols, which will limit the network to storage from a single vendor (proprietary networks). While EMC is believed to be working on its own Fibre Channel network devices, including a switch, DG is buying switches from third parties such as Brocade and Vixel to route SAN traffic.
