SANs Readied for SMBs

As midsize businesses show increasing interest in SANs, storage area network developers are more eager to help them take the plunge.

Adaptec Inc. this week at the Intel Developer Forum, in San Jose, Calif., will show its first IP-enabled storage arrays, with native IP connections and Serial ATA drives, said Tim Connolly, director of external storage for the Milpitas, Calif., company.

The iSA1500 will fit in a 1U (1.75-inch) rack and hold 1 terabyte; the iSA4500 will fit in a 2U (3.5-inch) rack, hold 3 terabytes and have high-availability features, Connolly said. Both models will ship by early next year, with software for remote and local mirroring and replication, plus snapshots and virtualization, all under the Universal Storage Management name, he said.

For users getting their first SAN, there are "issues of ease of use, management [and] migration. They buy another server. ... [But] before long they have a lot of servers built up, and its difficult to manage," he said.

For its part, EMC Corp. next week will unveil software that improves usability and management of its Clariion arrays, said sources close to the Hopkinton, Mass., storage company. The software in- cludes VisualSRM, based on technology obtained via EMCs April acquisition of Astrum Software Corp., for policy automation and reporting, and VisualSAN, for configuration and performance management.

Year of the mainstream SAN Developments expected next year: Adaptec to launch IP/ATA arrays EMC to focus on Clariion software Softek, Dell, Microsoft to add software

EMC will also announce Clariion metaLUNs, for on-the-fly changes using Navisphere software; new SnapView functions for snapshot rollback and Exchange management; and upgrades to SAN Copy.

Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. (Softek), in Sunnyvale, Calif., this fall will address configuration wizards, better documentation and user interface consistency for a software update, said officials.

Next year, Dell Inc. will launch its Enhanced Modular Storage Management service to help users with installations and management, officials in Round Rock, Texas, said.

And Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., plans to add storage network management to Windows with switch vendors help, according to officials.

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