Storage Web Digest: Synchronous SAN Sets Fibre Channel Distance Record and More

Enterprise Storage

IBM Shows New SAN Controller

IBM last week demonstrated its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) at its Hursley Park, UK laboratories. The SVC uses four 2Gbit-per-second FibreChannel interfaces, a 4GB cache and dual 2.4GHz Pentium 4 to manage heterogeneous hard disk storage independently of application servers—storage virtualization, in other words. Storage virtualization is disk management where the physical details of the hard disks are hidden by a controller from servers on a network. The controller can organize caching, reaction to faults, storage attachment and removal, as well as security, backup and other management issues, by bringing disparate devices together into components of one unit of storage, a single virtual disk drive which in the SVC can be up to 2 petabytes (roughly a million gigabytes) in size.

Read the full story on:ZDNet UK

Synchronous SAN Sets Fibre Channel Distance Record

Vtesse Networks and Hitachi Data Systems demonstrated a representative synchronous SAN application over a range of link lengths up to 600 kilometers, "six times farther than previously thought possible for a data application to be synchronously transmitted over a Fibre Channel link," the companies said. Asked what this means for Fibre Channel distance limits, Aidan Paul, CEO of Vtesse replied, "There is a practical limit, but not a hard one. It would be possible to go to 800 kilometers synchronous, but likely as not, most organizations would start to regionalize the IT infrastructure after that. There would also be a further gradual drop in throughput. I cant really see someone wanting to do synchronous across the Atlantic, for example, but asynchronous would be fine." Conventional Fibre Channel transmission "poses serious restrictions on realizable link lengths for synchronous SAN applications such as data replication using disk mirroring," according to the companies. Throughput capacity of a Fibre Channel system falls very quickly over link lengths greater than 100 kilometers due to the inherent time delay, or latency, of the fiber link length and insufficient buffering in Fibre Channel fabric switches.

Read the full story on:Enterprise Storage Forum

Personal Storage

Sunplus-Oak Joint Venture for Optical Storage Chipset Gets Underway

Sunplus Technology and US-based Oak Technology started a joint venture, Sunnext, in Taiwan that will launch CD-ROM and CD-R/RW drive chipsets at the beginning of the second quarter. Last month, the companies announced that Sunplus would acquire Oaks optical storage business and establish a spin-off to serve the PC sector exclusively while Sunplus concentrates on the consumer electronics sector. The president of the joint venture will come from Oaks original optical storage R&D team, Sunplus said.

Read the full story on:DigiTimes

Storage Business

Network Appliance Executives Sell Stock

Three top executives from Network Appliance sold a combined $5.7 million in stock of the network storage company in the days after it announced quarterly increases in revenue and earnings. On Feb. 11, Network Appliance announced third-quarter earnings of $228.5 million, compared with $198.3 million a year earlier. Network Appliance spokesman Eric Brown said the company does not comment on individual executive stock transactions, but added that the trades represent a small portion of the executives total holdings.

Read the full story on: Mercury News