Ready for take-off
The results suggest that the adoption rate for SANs is rising. In another survey conducted three months previously, 30 percent of respondents were considering deploying the technology. In the later survey the proportion considering deployment had risen to 45 percent.
SAN technology offers users the chance to build data storage environments where multiple servers running different applications can access information held anywhere on a network.
Advances in management software mean that SAN systems are able to work with different incompatible host servers on a heterogeneous network. There are still technological hurdles yet to be overcome, but IBM believes these problems will be solved within the year.
The biggest problem seems to be in getting the different interpretations of Fibre Channel to work together. Suppliers have come together to thrash out a solution, but it will be some time before their work bears fruit. Despite IBM's assertion that the solution is now in place, the reality is that there can still be incompatible versions of what would initially appear to be the same technology.
Fibre Channel is not the only area of incompatibility. Vendors are still trying to resolve compatibility issues with switch ports, multiple switch fabrics, name services and registered state-change notification. All of these and more stand in the way of achieving what would, in effect, be an industry standard SAN architecture that all vendors could use.
Meanwhile, most packaged SAN solutions fail to meet every requirement, leaving IT managers with the task of selecting components from different vendors.
To assist in this, US firm McData has created a testing programme called FabricReady, which tests the hardware and software offerings from more than a dozen vendors. FabricReady tests for integration capabilities and interoperability so that the company can then offer a range of proven SAN solutions. With a range of offerings, the company should be able to match most enterprise requirements and budgets. It already has a package available that provides a LAN-free backup and tape consolidation bundle, and plans to launch packages later this year that are configured for groupware, database and clustering applications.
McData also plans to provide details of compatible products for any application via its Web site.
