Storage uprising
From finance, insurance, manufacturing, transportation, telecommunications to government, all industry segments are seeing an explosive growth in their storage requirements, says Sewell. Compaq's server and storage revenue grew 20 percent year-over-year with strength across all their high-end product lines.
In terms of storage developments, he sees SAN, DAS and NAS as being complementary rather than competing technologies, each playing a role in an organisation. Compaq is developing solutions that allow Network Attached Storage and Direct Attached Storage to be accessible from the SAN. This will allow an organisation to eventually have all of its storage accessible from any server attached to the SAN.
The other major technology development will be the introduction of virtualisation where the entire SAN is defined by virtual storage pools rather than physical storage boxes. Compaq's virtualisation solution, VersaStor, will allow customers to define virtual storage pools and non-disruptively move data from one pool to another. With VersaStor, the customer will be able to easily manage a SAN with minimal staff as the customer now manages virtual pools and VersaStor looks after the physical location of data. Data location will be defined by desired performance and availability attributes rather than physical location.
A SAN also provides an ideal environment for backup. With an enterprise backup solution, all servers and storage attached to the SAN can be backed up to a single tape library. Coupled with cloning technologies like Compaq SANworks Enterprise Volume Manager or Virtual Replicator, a customer can set up a backup environment where backups are achieved with almost no interruption to application availability.
Before long, SAN management will surface as an issue. As the amount of storage increases, the management of it will require either more people, who are hard to find, or smarter management tools and techniques. Currently, Compaq's SAN Management Appliance supports a number of management applications, including Allocation Reporting, Performance Management, Storage Area Network Management and SAN Element Management
It now looks like a SAN strategy will allow customers to focus on managing their business rather than their storage.
