Storage Vendors Strut Their Latest Stuff At Storage Networking World

Among the biggest news at Storage Networking World Fall 2003 -- which opened Monday in Orlando and runs through Thursday -- was the demonstration of the Storage Networking Industry Association's new specification, once dubbed 'Bluefin,' and now called SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification).

Designed to allow administrators to manage heterogeneous storage environments packed with hardware and software from numerous vendors within a single management framework, SMI-S is backed by big name players in the storage market, including HP, IBM, EMC, and Veritas, all of which have previously announced they would roll out products integrating the standard next year.

SNIA created an interoperability lab in Colorado Springs, Colo. in August that vendors can use to test their wares against the standard, and at Storage Networking World, the group will again host a demo using real-world products. The final version of the standard will release in January 2004, said the SNIA.

Among the vendors making news at Storage Networking World were:

LSI Logic, which rolled out MyStorage, a management product targeting small and mid-sized businesses using Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI technologies to tie together their storage networks. Scheduled to ship in early 2004, the new software lets administrators remotely manage and configure LSI Logic's host bus adapters.

McData, meanwhile, will demonstrate the 10 gigabit-per-second capability of its Intrepid Directors and Emulex host bus adapters, as well as tout its SANtegrity Security Suite, a collection of storage security management tools that provides virtualization, work process automation, and security policy features. The Broomfield, Colo.-based maker of switches will also show off its Sphereon intelligent fabric switches using StoreAge's management and provisioning software.

Brocade, another major storage hardware vendor, is joining with Kashya, a maker of business continuity software, to show off a new data replication and disaster recovery solution. Kashya's code, which runs on Brocade's Silkworm Fabric Application Platform AP7420 switch, allows administrators to replicate data independent of the storage and server platforms used in the network.

Brocade will also unveil its Fabric Routing Services at the trade show. The technology suite -- which includes Fibre Channel-to-Fibre Channel and iSCSI-to-Fibre Channel -- is designed to extend the reach of wide area storage networks.

nStor took advantage of Storage Networking World's captive audience to introduce its Wahoo-SATA 2Gb Fibre Channel to Serial ATA RAID controller. The new controller offers Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or U320 SCSI host connections for connecting to SAN, direct connect, and network attached devices; supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50; and can be configured either in-band out out-of-band.

The ubiquitous Microsoft didn't have any new products of its own to strut onto stage, but it did beat the drum for various partners, which have taken up with various Microsoft server technologies out of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003, both of which were released this summer.

QLogic, for instance, rolled out Monday a slew of products that make use of new storage-oriented features within Windows Server 2o03. Among them are the $6,999 SAN Connectivity Kit for Windows Server 2003, a turnkey SAN with a late 2003 release that includes a SANbox Fibre Channel switch, four SANblade Fibre Channel host bus adapters, and SAN management software. QLogic also unveiled SANsurfer VDS Manager, a Windows-based disk array administrative tool that complements the Windows VDS Command Line Interface and allows users to configure RAID levels and logical volumes in environments composed of wares from multiple vendors.

Even vendors not at Storage Networking World took the opportunity to make announcements, figuring to ride the news coat tails.

StorageTek, for example, debuted a new router for tape libraries -- the StorageNet 3300 Fibre Channel Router -- to tie StorageTek tape storage devices into 2Gbit-based storage area networks (SANs). With the SN3300, IT can share StorageTek tape libraries among multiple servers, partition them, or divide them into separate storage pools.

This story courtesy of TechWeb