Enterprises attracted by the lower costs of storage over IP will get previews of the emerging technology from several vendors at Comdex this week.
Entrada Networks will introduce two products at the show in Las Vegas: the IP Silverline switch, for Gigabit Ethernet-to-Fibre Channel connections, and the SAN (storage area network) Light Optical switch, to move storage over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing connections.
The Silverline switch has two Fibre Channel ports, two WAN ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for LANs and WANs.
The Silverline and SAN Light Optical switches, which will be sold only through OEM deals, are scheduled to ship in January, according to a source close to the company.
SAN Valley Systems will hold several interoperability demonstrations that include the company's SAN Patrol management application.
The software will be integrated with Hewlett-Packard's OpenView to show integrated management of SAN, LAN and metropolitan-area network equipment from a single interface.
Another demo will highlight remote disaster recovery. Veritas Software's storage replication in Volume Manager will work over a Gigabit Ethernet network to duplicate data over a WAN.
SAN Valley will use its SL 1000 Gateway, which supports four Fibre Channel ports and four Gigabit Ethernet ports to demonstrate remote disaster recovery over an IP network.
The company will also show a configuration that transports rich media from a RAID disk array through a Brocade Communications Systems Fibre Channel switch, across a Gigabit Ethernet network and to a server that will store the information on a local disk.
A video will be streamed from a central site over an IP network to a client and, at the same time, archived in a storage array.
Another configuration will transport storage data over IP via an OC-48 connection that supports quality of service with LAN/SAN traffic sharing a 2.5G-bps fiber link. Officials said this demonstration would be of particular interest to customers who want to make use of their Synchronous Optical Network infrastructure.
SAN Valley officials said that certain custom ers are clamoring for storage-over-IP technology because it is cost-effective.
"The storage providers are very interested in moving forward quickly," said Rick Wadsworth, SAN Valley's vice president of marketing.
We have had "Storage over IP" and "storage virtualisation" for over a decade - it's called NFS. With NIC's now offloading CPU through hardware TCP checksums, Bus Master DMA transfers and Jumbo Frame (large MTUsize) support, much of the perceived performance disadvandage is gone. For the small, random I/O's that characterise over 90% of application traffic NFS will well outperform iSCSI.