Network Appliance Inc is working with fibre channel switch maker Brocade Communications Systems Inc in an effort to merge what it sees as the complementary benefits of network attached storage and the newer storage area networks. Santa Clara, California- based NetApp has announced its intention to OEM Brocade’s SilkWorm switches, and is currently working with the company on the necessary integration work. The first products are due later this year says the company. SAN and NAS storage architectures have been viewed by some as competitors, largely because they both use the similar approach of separating the data from the application server, which enables data to be managed centrally, storage capacity to be upgraded independently from the server, and data fault-resilience to be built into the system if a server goes down. But, as NetApp has pointed out before, SANs deal with raw data, and can’t help users share files between Unix and NT servers, as users of NetApp’s dedicated file servers can. Nor can NetApp users share tape drives or other resources over the network from different systems, or extend their storage architecture to reach beyond the single fibre channel loop supported by network attached systems. The two propose a combination, with desktop machines continuing to speak TCP/IP and using NetApp’s NFS/CFS file system for data sharing on the file server, while providing a back-end link to the SAN via a Brocade switch. Brocade has something like 85% of the fibre channel fabric switch market, though NetApp says the deal is not exclusive. And Brocade itself is planning to announce similar deals with server OEMS early in February. Other companies in the same market include Gadzoox Networks Inc, Ancor Communications Inc and Vixel Corp. If fibre channel standards were more mature, a simple OEM deal would be all that’s required, but as it is NetApp and Brocade must work on making sure their systems run together properly, as Brocade still has to do with all its OEMs. NetApp already supports fibre channel connectivity direct to disks, which it gets from Seagate Technology Inc, and says that within six months of introducing fibre, 90% of its customers were choosing it in preference to SCSI. Dell Computer Corp, which recently signed an OEM deal with NetApp, said it was happy with the move. Charlie Simmons, VP of marketing at NetApp, said the move was in part spurred on by some of the claims made by advocates of storage area networks, particularly Veritas Inc, which he said regularly showed diagrams of heterogeneous servers connected to a SAN network. It isn’t going to happen, said Simmons, unless users agree to change over to Veritas’ proprietary file system.
