SAN functionality beyond the basic routing of data is beginning to move into storage routers. Graham Schultz, Brocade's strategic alliance manager -- Australia and New Zealand, says that while the first application for the company's Fabric Application Platform was Brocade's own multiprotocol router (which is designed to link multiple SANS via fibre-to-fibre routing, iSCSI-to-fibre bridging or fibre-IP extension), it is also available to third party developers. They are able to use the platform as the basis for a variety of services, such as virtual tape (storage that presents itself to the system as a tape library, but which actually stores the data on disk; in this context, that disk is virtualised through the SAN).
"This is a major step forward," says Schultz, but one that can be implemented progressively rather than in an immediate switchover. Organisations need to understand vendors' directions so they can plan for the next two or three years, he says.
"There's a lot of work being done in the virtualisation space," says Boland. Requests to access a storage array can be handled in the network rather than by either the host or the array, and that avoids duplicating traffic on the network.
Cisco is combining with Veritas to put storage virtualisation functions into switches in order to create virtual SANs.
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