Storage Area Network Notes

Avaya debuts power-over-Ethernet products, Dell discounts the lot, Sprint auctions surplus gear, IBM's shark smells blood, and companies partner to produce SAN bundled solutions. Meanwhile, the storage funding feast continues.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [July 27, 2001]

As brownout concerns in California and select spots across the nation abate, Avaya has announced that it is one of the first companies to develop a switch incorporating current IEEE 802.3af standards powering Ethernet connections.

Avaya and PowerDsine co-designed the switch, dubbed the Avaya P333T-PWR. The device employs an automatic line sensing capability identifying terminals as Power over LAN Enabled, preventing the distribution of power to unenabled devices.

Dell didn't issue a press release, but it is offering $100 off every computer it makes—from the lowliest Celeron to top-of-the-line RAID servers. Free PDAs with some computers are also offered as part of Dell's "buy-now" incentives.

The post-boom equipment sell-off continues as Sprint built its own Web site just to auction off surplus gear. The phone firm warns bidders that "all items are offered for sale on an "as-is, where-as" basis without warranty or guarantee."

With that caveat in mind, it appears to be a great place to buy outdated equipment in bulk. One lot of desktop PCs, priced at $700, included 19 Dell computers—ranging between 166 MHz and 233 MHz with hard drives from 2.1 GB to 8.5 GB. At the high-end of the scale, a 100KW natural gas generator still in the box is offered for $10,000. There were no bids on the generator, probably because purchasers pay their own shipping costs ... Not exactly eBay, is it?

IBM's shark smells blood

IBM Shark enterprise storage server

IBM and EMC continue to duke it out at the top end of the market with IBM's shark server competing against EMC's Symmetrix machine. Forecast revenues at EMC have dropped by one-third. EMC began the year with a forecast that revenue would grow 35 percent this year to $12 billion but last week declined to give a second-half guidance and is now expected to post revenue below last year's $8.87 billion.

Bundling SANs
Adaptec and Hewlett-Packard teamed up to produce a combined SAN solution incorporating iSCSI protocols. The solution includes Adaptec's AEA-7111C iSCSI host bus adapter, HP switches, tape libraries, disk arrays, and HP OpenView management software. Earlier this month, Adaptec moved to acquire Platys Communications. Platys develops and markets storage networking products, including highly differentiated iSCSI ASICs, scalable to 10 GBit.

Ingram-Micro also came out with a SAN-in-a-box solution. Lori Snow, Ingram Micro U.S. vice president, product management, said its SAN bundle provides an easy point of entry for customers interested in expanding their businesses with high-end storage products.

"Our VAR customers rely upon us to provide them with the right mix of products, solutions, training, and support to be successful in this high-growth market," Snow said.

Gear galore
MTI Technology Corp. released the Vivant D100 direct-attach storage product with two 100 MB/sec high-speed Fiber Channel connections.

Auspex introduced a new NAS file server (right). The NAS 3010 set an Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) record earlier this month, processing up to 19,755 I/O IOPS in SPECsfs97 benchmark testing. Auspex says the achievement is 20 percent better than its closest competitor.

Next month, the 3000 series will be released in a rack-compatible modular design. The series features dual 933 MHz Pentium III processors and offers a choice between a proprietary SAN and systems based on 4-Port Mylex Controllers.

The latest feature in Maxtor storage software is the ability to recover inadvertently deleted files, which the company calls "the leading cause of data loss." Retrieval is facilitated by a journaling file system, which takes periodic snapshots of the system's data configuration allowing system administrators to revert to a previous data configuration on demand. The software is based on the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system.

Maxtor's latest product is the Maxtor MaxAttach NAS 4300, priced at $5,999 MSRP, available now from distributors. The product employs an 866 MHz Pentium III and is a 400GB 1U rackmount server. Features—too numerous to list here—include support for multiple OSs, various RAID levels, and ultra SCSI.

Free food and drink
Meanwhile, the storage funding feast continues with two distended dollops of cash. Manufacturer of processors for storage systems Trebia Networks raised $30 million in second-round financing for product development and Celox Networks amassed $80 million in third-round financing for switch development.

—End