(Broad-Band Backbone) Interoperability Project to establish Japan’s first storage enviroment-independent interoperability center to facilitate deployment of Storage Area Networks (SANs) containing multi-vendor equipment.
As companies expand their SAN deployments to span increasingly heterogeneous environments, end to end interoperability across the storage environment is crucial. The new B-cube interoperability center will provide solutions ranging from testing to consultation services that encourage companies to make use of large-scale SAN environments for broadband networks. By creating an open interoperability center, TIS, Emtorage, TEL, Brocade, and VERITAS Software are working to speed adoption of storage networking in Japan by offering systems integrators, partners, and their customers the opportunity to leverage a heterogeneous test bed to qualify configurations and perform troubleshooting.
In Japan, the market for open storage systems is estimated to be as large as 250 billion yen; folding related software, consulting services, and maintenance services into this figure results in a market estimated to be about 350 billion yen. Demand for data management systems which apply to broad-band networks is projected to rise to 560 billion yen in 2004. The Participants will share customers, inspection data, and technology know-how from this project, which will enable them to enlarge their business to estimated combined sales of 56 billion yen in 2004, or 10 % of the storage market.
In Tokyo, the current expansion of the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) has enabled high speed, high capacity (40Gbps) data communication. This expansion has in turn increased the demand for SANs that are compatible with MANs in the fields of finance, IT, and public service industries that require strategic, efficient management of enormous amounts of data. Moreover, SANs form a scalable, reliable, manageable, and secure networking foundation for business continuance applications such as remote mirroring and backup and high availability.
B-cube will put forth an initial investment of approximately 400 million-yen in the areas of facilities, hardware, and software to establish the Interoperability Center to be located within one of TIS’s iDC buildings in Tokyo. In the long term, the companies expect to invest up to 3 billion-yen to meet increasing demand for testing and consulting services in Japan.
The B-cubed Interoperability Center will open in November 2001; testing and consultation services will be available from December 2001.
