By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM yesterday rolled out five new SAN solutions for its Netfinity PC server line while at the same time opening a SAN testing facility for customers on all IBM platforms to test their SAN configurations out on IBM’s own iron.
The new Netfinity solutions extend IBM’s SAN offerings, which it first started shipping for the PC line this summer. The Netfinity Disk and Tape Pooling solution lets multiple servers in different physical locations that share a SAN disk and tape storage pool to share that pool even if their operating systems are not clustered. The whole point of a SAN is to get the servers out of the storage cluster, since server clustering eats up processing resources and is unnecessary for storage pools, so this offering makes sense.
IBM has also announced availability extensions to Microsoft’s Cluster Server for Windows NT, code-named Wolfpack; these extensions, code-named Cornhusker, have been expected for some time (CI No 3,666). Cornhusker will enable companies to create an eight-node Windows NT server cluster, a far cry more than the two-node clustering available from Microsoft. IBM was expected to expand the Cornhusker clustering to 16 nodes by year’s end, but it looks like that has slipped into next year. The Netfinity Advanced Cluster Enabler for Oracle Parallel Server allows Windows NT to support OPS, much as RS/6000 SP parallel servers do. The Advanced Cluster Enabler code allows NT customers to take advantage of the speed and redundancy that comes with using OPS, but odds are it will only appeal to customers who have the manpower to manage a parallel implementation, which is considerably more complex than managing a standard SMP server. Nonetheless, for certain data warehousing and OLTP jobs where NT is a requirement, OPS is pretty much the only option for big jobs and IBM’s extensions will make OPS Netfinity clusters more attractive. Presumably, this software, as well as Cornhusker, will work on Compaq ProLiant, Hewlett-Packard NetServer and Dell PowerEdge servers too, but IBM isn’t saying.
The Netfinity Server and Storage Consolidation offering provides storage sharing among geographically distributed Netfinities that are linked to IBM’s Shark Enterprise Storage Servers. IBM is offering Distance Cluster with Remote Mirroring to let increase the distance in a two-node Microsoft Wolfpack cluster to 10km. And finally, IBM has announced that it has upgraded the Netfinity Fibre Channel storage array’s Java-based storage management software. The new storage manager enables storage managers to create storage pools that are spread across multiple servers, among other things. Prices for these SAN products were not available.
The new SAN Interoperability Lab, which is located in IBM Global Services’ testing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will offer customers a chance to test their SAN architectures before implementing them in their shops. The lab has 10,000 MIPS of processing capacity and 40Tb of disk capacity on site; this iron is not just from IBM, but also from Unix and NT competitors and storage competitors like EMC Corp and StorageTek.
