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Charting a Success Story

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DQI Bureau
New Update

How did he do it? Dataquest chief editor Prasanto K Roy finds out in a

tête-à-tête with this Renaissance man in Mumbai. Once a genuine cowboy, Hitz,

currently executive VP, engineering of Network Appliance maintains that he got

"valuable management experience herding, branding and castrating cattle

before taking up his present career"! He spoke at length on a wide range of

topics, from the future of Storage Area Networks (SAN), storage virtualization,

to bandwidth requirement for storage consolidation. Excerpts:

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On how the company came to be called Network Appliance and the ''storage

appliance'' concept.



In 1985, Sun was number one provider of TCP/IP routing systems with its

workstation solutions. Then Cisco decided to build special-purpose dedicated

devices that would only do routing as they thought TCP/IP was here to stay.

Hence, the concept of appliance was introduced successfully for the first time.

When we named our company Network Appliances, we copied Cisco''s reasoning, but

from the perspective of storage. We thought storage over networking was here to

stay and our goal was to successfully emulate Cisco''s success with the

appliance concept.

SANs

might become redundant around 2006-07 when 10 gigabit

Ethernet will go mainstream

At that time, no one understood the term appliance. In fact, all VCs

therefore refused to invest in NetApp. However, we were determined to follow

Cisco''s model, and incidentally, the chairman of the board of directors at

Cisco became the chairman of our board of directors. After that, we also

obtained VC funding from Sequoia. We thought we would come out with a whole

bunch of appliances, and so named our company Network Appliance instead of

Storage Appliances. Generally, if you take a bird''s eye view, the concept of

appliances has succeeded for storage-as it has with us, or networking routers

have in the instance of Cisco, or networking printers as in HP''s case. It has

failed whenever something like a general-purpose server appliance has been

tried, because that makes for unnecessary complexity.

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It seems to be that network speeds and storage channels

are converging and might even intersect at some point of time. Does this imply

that there might not be any compelling reasons to move to SAN?



There are at least three compelling reasons why SAN fiber channels will stay

viable at least for the time being. A look at the performance numbers for both

Ethernet and fiber channel, will tell you that they lie very close within the

same bandwidth. But, it is on the reliability front that fiber channel scores.

What CIOs like about fiber channels is the QoS model and the way the packets are

handled. Ethernet is improving, but it still has a long way to go. The next

reason is that most enterprises would rather have a separate dedicated network.

In many companies, even application- and storage-group people are not allowed to

build TCP/IP networks. The diktat is that if it is a TCP/IP network it has to be

provided by the network infrastructure group. So if the storage group has to

build a dedicated network, it has to be on fiber channel. Lastly, adoption of

fiber channels has a lot to do with the certifications in the industry. Many of

the high-end applications like databases or other enterprise apps are certified

only on fiber channel.

My prediction is that SANs might become redundant around

2006-07 when 10 gigabit Ethernet will go mainstream. Enterprises will then need

to move their SAN fiber channel to10 gigabit fiber channels and the additional

cost involved will make many of them to go for a single Ethernet deployment. We

feel that there will be a large deployment of even iSCSI and NAS, which is

happening anyway in the current scenario.

Would you therefore expect a movement back from SAN to

Ethernet-based storage solutions?



I would not look at the issue in that way. What happened was when most SAN

implementations took place about two years ago, the network infrastructure in

most cases was not that good. While Ethernet has improved considerably, we might

not see a reverse exodus from SAN. In two to three years, when gigabit Ethernet

becomes the norm, we might see Ethernet becoming the preferred mode over fiber

channel. We might even have a solution like iSCSI that straddles the worlds of

both Ethernet and fiber channel.

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How do you balance the choice of technology between a

SAN/NAS and the access mechanism?



One of the reasons why wires are becoming less and less important is because

the wire speed of Ethernet has begun to approximate more and more the wire speed

of fiber channels. The other reason is that, while fiber channel was much faster

than 100base Ethernet, there were no performance dips with respect to most

applications, because the bottleneck was the disk drive, not the wire. The

answer to the problem of reducing access mechanism bottlenecks is storage

consolidation, whereby grouping multiple drives will lead to enhancement of

performance. But access mechanisms or disk drives should not be the determining

factor in the choice of NAS or SAN.

Most storage vendors claim that even if storage across the

enterprise lies in disparate devices, by virtue of storage virtualization it can

be used/managed as a single logical unit. What are the problems here?



Whenever someone talks about storage virtualization, you need to ask: what

is not good about the available storage solution that you have to talk about

virtual storage in the first place? The first problem is that it is not big

enough, so you cannot solve all your problems with one storage solution, but

instead, require multiple solutions. To make them look like one solution, you

can put them in one network like NAS/SAN and this would also require management

tools. But the question remains: how can we take little chunks of storage and

make them look bigger? Ironically, the second problem is that virtual storage is

too big. For instance, for 100 different users, you need to buy just one, big

storage system instead of multiple devices, because it works out to be cheaper.

And then you will make this one look like tiny systems through the use of

different management tools. The third challenge is how to handle these

management tools, since this would involve not only applications from storage

vendors, but even apps like HP Openview or CA Unicenter that are basically

infrastructure management tools. Handling so many storage-management as well as

infrastructure tools can become cumbersome.

With bandwidth being expensive and scarce in India till

quite recently, for many enterprises the WAN architecture across cities cannot

support technologies like storage consolidation...



The Indian situation is quite similar to the one in the US, where bandwidth

became cheaper and more easily available after the telecom operators

deregulated. But even then there are still very few enterprise applications that

run remotely. So even for storage consolidation, you will not find a situation

where enterprises consolidate all of their storage in one single city. Even in

the US there is not enough bandwidth, and I do not expect the situation to be

any different in India. But at least each of the home directories on individual

desktops, which have apps like PowerPoint and Word, can be consolidated to a

single site. Plus, enough bandwidth is now available to have an online

consolidated mirror in another city, which can act as the DR site.

Rajneesh De with

Prasanto K Roy

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