Walt Hinton, chief strategist at Storage Technology Inc, said that IBM Corp was a year late with its endorsement of storage area networks (see Top Stories). He pointed out that IBM has chosen to employ a Virtual Storage Server in between the storage devices and the switches and hubs, which he says is likely to result in both high latency, high cost and scalability problems. The server is based on a modified RS/6000 Unix server. Storagetek prefers to embed intelligence in the storage switch itself. Hinton said that StorageTek has now installed over 200 implementations of storage area networks, and has been shipping applications such as LAN free backup and multi-vendor tape pooling since January.
And while Hinton agrees that IBM’s ESCON could legitimately be viewed as the first storage area networking technology for S/390 mainframes, he doesn’t seem convinced over IBM’s contention that the newer FICON 100Mbps fibre optic channels are the right way to migrate the technology over to open SANs. The first implementation of FICON wasn’t compatible with fibre channel, he says, and although the second version will enable ESCON protocols to run over the fibre channel physical layer – through a Brocade switch, for instance – it doesn’t offer any translation capabilities. StorageTek says it plans to offer such translation capabilities through its intelliigent switches some time this year.
