The SAN landscape is shifting as equipment makers push for increased interoperability with peers' gear. Also, meet the world's fastest RAID controller, not to be confused with the world's smallest RAID controller.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 8, 2001]

A venerable six-pack of equipment makers introduced a series of initiatives this week intended to develop cross-vendor, interoperable storage networking. The six-some includes Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Compaq Computer Corporation , EMC Corporation , Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS/N), IBM Corporation , and McDATA Corporation.

The group's first product is a 128-port Fibre Channel fabric that logically partitions services into vendor-specific data zones. Further research into SAN interoperability issues will be undertaken by the Supported Solutions Forum of the Storage Network Industry Association .

Also this week, OpNext Inc. joined the XENPAK 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) fiber optic transceiver multi-source agreement (MSA) group to develop technoligies that support the proposed IEEE 802.3ae standard.

Two storage companies made big changes. Adaptec 's founder, Larry Boucher, a SCSI innovator, resigned from the board to take the helm of his new company, Alacritech. One of Boucher's first missions—increase network speeds with Alacritech's Session Layer Interface Card (SLIC) technology that offloads network protocol data processing from the CPU to increase network speeds.

Spacedisk, Inc. changed its name to Accelion. Leadership completed the name change in order to "more accurately reflect the company's focus on accelerating the storage and delivery of premium content to the end user." So what's wrong with disk space?

Big news about small products
Big chipmaking news from Intel as it debuted the Intel Xeon processor capable of attaining speeds up to 1.7 GHz. The processor srarts at $406 in 1,000-unit quantities.

TL-RMSYS 101

Wondering what Intel is up to? Well, xeon is defined as a polynucleotide sequence in a nucleic acid that codes information for protein synthesis and that is copied and spliced together with other such sequences to form messenger RNA. Can't wait to see the Blue Man Group riff on this one! Intel also debuted its Itanium chip with a fatter 64-bit pipe for fast servers. Over 35 products based on the chip, from about 25 manufacturers, are on the drawing boards, for release later this year. An 800 MHz chip with 4MB of L3 cache will sell to OEMs for about $4,227.

TechnoLand announced a new 1U server. Its TL-RMSYS 101 Series (above) has one power supply, a 64 bit PCI slot, and two hot-swappable drives for RAID 1 configuration. The system can support one or two Intel Pentium III processors. It has four fans, a powerful blower, and special heat sinks. Pricing is unavailable at this time.

Sun's latest cut-price 1U server deal features the The Sun Blade 100 workstation with a 500-MHz UltraSPARC-IIe processor priced at $995.

SANcastle Technologies announced its first product offering, the GFS-8, a bridge between Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks. The switch will be priced between $32,000 and $38,000 depending on port configuration. Its eight ports can include one, two, or four Gigabit Ethernet ports, with the remaining configured as Fibre Channel ports.

Advanced Digital Information Corporation unveiled a tape library called the Scalar 10K which is available in various configurations with capacity up to 881.5 TB. Scalar 10K libraries are delivered with extra capacity already installedand users can simply contact ADIC for a software "key" that activates additional capacity in blocks of 100 slots. Pricing is unavailable at this time.

Digi-Data Corporation 's Fibre Sabre 2000 controller uses a 64 bit, 66 MHz (528 MB/sec) internal memory bus to deliver 95 MB/sec sustained disk transfers (with only five disks) reading and writing over 1 Fibre Channel host connection. The company says these are the world's fastest RAID controllers. Pricing is unavailable at this time.

That's the world's fastest RAID, this is the world's smallest:

Adaptec's latest RAID controller, the Adaptec 2005S (right) is designed to achieve power savings of up to 75 percent by using notebook-type SO-DIMM connectors in place of PCI slots, and through Adaptec's EMRL technology (Embedded RAID Logic) technology.

Adaptec 2005S

Lee Caswell, Adaptec Storage Solutions Group vice president and general manager, said it's the "world's smallest RAID card and it's made possible by our unique ASIC technology and system expertise".

The Adaptec 2005S is scheduled to ship to OEMs in the second half of the year priced $225 each.

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