ARTICLE POSTED June 11, 2001
Standards stew on high heat as vendors stir pot
By Mary Ryan-Garcia
Don Eklund is a believer in Fibre Channel technology — and he isn't in any rush to replace a hefty Fibre Channel investment at Sony Pictures DVD Center in Culver City, Calif., where the DVD mastering process is handled in conjunction with Sony Pictures' High Definition Center. The process involves film-to-tape and audio transfers through disk mastering. The Center produces over 100 versions of DVD titles each month.
At each stage of the mastering process, data is saved to central storage, then retrieved for the next stage. A DVD typically requires 10GB of storage, and more complex titles need up to 15GB. With the help of SAN Solutions Inc. of Incline Village, Nev., Sony Pictures DVD Center implemented a Fibre Channel SAN utilizing SilkWorm 2800 fabric switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif. With the Brocade switches, all SAN-enabled clients are able to access over two TB of storage. Encoders can write to any drive, and engineers can access DVD projects from any workstation.
To date, Sony is pleased with its Fibre Channel implementation. "Some of our proprietary software would become much harder to modify and maintain if additional protocol requirements were placed on the SAN," says Eklund, who is vice president of engineering. "We made these decisions before other alternatives were readily available. Even so, Brocade provides a robust solution with a proven track record that solved our connectivity problem. In the face of other choices available today, we would most likely arrive at the same solution."
Prior to implementing the Fibre Channel solution, Sony's DVD mastering system consisted of 26 clients — three audio encoders, four video encoders, one management station and 18 workstations — connected through SCSI switches to six RAID arrays with 760GB. The workstations were divided into six workgroups, each linked to a single storage array. Unfortunately, the configuration couldn't scale fast enough for Sony's growing storage demands, and it didn't enable storage sharing between workgroups, which limited DVD production.
Eklund adds, "IP storage for our operation is not currently on our radar. We currently have cost effective solutions for our connectivity requirements and we have little reason to investigate making a major change in either our SAN or our Ethernet network. As long as native Fibre Channel drives are available to us for growth and are priced competitively with drives using other interfaces, we will continue to expand our storage accordingly."
Fibre Channel solutions expanding
For their part, vendors continue to introduce new solutions that incorporate Fibre Channel as well as other aspiring standards. At the recent Spring 2001 Storage Networking World conference, held in Palm Desert, Calif., Cisco Systems Inc. outlined the details of Cisco Storage Networking. Based on Cisco Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data (AVVID), the platform allows users to grow their storage resources across a converged IP, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and optical network infrastructure. Cisco Storage Networking is designed to accelerate the deployment of both block-based SANs and file-based NAS. The company also announced the Cisco SN 5420 Storage Router, an iSCSI-based networking platform that enables applications such as storage consolidated data backup, and archiving to tape.
In addition, Brocade rolled out its SilkWorm 12000 Core Fabric Switch, which is available in 64-port and 128-port configurations. The new switch expands the capabilities of existing Fibre Channel storage environments, and can support both IP and emerging InfiniBand networks.
IP strikes back; other Fibre initiatives on the rise
Despite Fibre Channel's entrenched position, at least one analyst predicts that it is becoming less significant as IP storage standards evolve. "Those who have not yet implemented a SAN may pause and ask, 'Now that IP storage networking has been announced, why use Fibre Channel at all?'" remarks Dan Tanner, senior analyst, storage and storage management, with the Aberdeen Group in Boston. "Certainly, existing installations of Fibre Channel SANs aren't broken and don't need to be fixed. But iSCSI will tend to dominate the storage market. Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) is good work, encapsulating or tunneling Fibre Channel into IP, but its major usefulness will be in connecting SAN islands from geographical distances. It's nice FCIP is getting improved, but again, it's tunneling, not native."
Fibre Channel advocates are hard at work supporting their technology. These advocates include the backers of the FibreAlliance, the SNMP-based Management Information Base (MIB) technology initiative (sponsored by FibreAlliance), and the Fabric Shortest Path First routing protocol.
"FibreAlliance and SNMP-based MIB were initially spearheaded by EMC Corp. and supported by Brocade and other vendors selling host bus adapters, and switch and management applications," says Steve Wilson, a principal engineer, Brocade and chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Fibre Channel Workgroup. "It is still under discussion, however, and has not yet been ratified in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF.)"
The FibreAlliance is a consortium of over 50 vendors that provide Fibre-Channel-based SAN components such as hubs, switches, routers and host-bus adapters. According to the organization's Web site, the FibreAlliance's SNMP-based MIB is a set of parameters whose values define and describe the status of a network and its components. The MIB allows users to collect and display SAN device information and launch each device's management tools, such as configuration and control utilities. It is currently progressing through IETF's review process. The proposal can be viewed at www.ietf.org or at www.fibrealliance.org.
With regards to the Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF) initiative, which was originally developed and proposed by Brocade, Wilson says it is close to receiving IETF ratification. "This standard has been included in the FC-SW-2 switching standard under the T11 technical committee of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS.) FSPF has support from all switch vendors," says Wilson, who is also the technical editor for FC-SW-2.
Wilson further explains that in order to provide access to storage beyond data centers, standards such as iSCSI, FCIP and iFCP/SoIP, are also being developed under IETF. "As IP is predominantly used in the networks that connect the clients, these standards, when ratified, will ultimately allow the expansion of the capabilities of Fibre Channel-based SAN- to IP-based clients by providing gateway functions," he says. "End-customers benefit by achieving large block access to data center devices using both Fibre Channel SANs and IP-based storage access to the end clients, which are connected to IP-based LANs to support applications such as remote backup from remote and branch offices. Today, tens of thousands of heterogeneous, interoperable storage area networks are deployed worldwide, supporting business-critical applications such as back-up, storage consolidation, disaster tolerance, etc."
Overall, Wilson predicts that Fibre-Channel-based SANs will continue to be deployed at a rapid rate, even amidst the continued progression of IP-based storage standards. "IP-based networks will continue to serve as the primary enterprise computing network," he says. "Over time, as IP-based storage products such as iSCSI-based bridges to Fibre Channel networks come to market, the data center will continue to be a multiprotocol, multi-device and heterogeneous environment. Advancing IP standards to support this will be important, as will continuing to advance Fibre Channel standards to support business-critical block data applications in the storage environment."
Fibre Channel: two generations and counting
Vendors seem responsive to the needs of storage users as Fibre Channel continues along its path of evolution. "The first generation can be characterized as the initial acceptance of interconnect standards, the proliferation of storage and networking products based on the new standards, and the realization of tangible business benefits from the use of Fibre Channel-based products," says Mark Lewis, senior product marketing manager, Tape Automation Solutions, with StorageTek, a $2 billion storage solutions company headquartered in Louisville, Colo.
Lewis continues, "The second generation is characterized by the introduction of new high speed products, integrated management tools to aid large scale customers in the administration of Fibre Channel-based SANs, and the realization of the Fibre Channel-based SAN as the standard for implementation of large scale storage configurations."
For the time being, however, Fibre Channel SAN management issues remain a hurdle for storage users. According to Christian Griebel who works in the Systems Management area at the Bio and Chemoinformatics company Merck KGaA, in Darmstadt, Germany. "It's a challenge to manage different vendors' storage appliances in a holistic, consistent and comprehensive way. Currently, we live with the software each vendor provides for its own storage system."
Although the FibreAlliance's SNMP-based MIB is making its way through IETF and is expected to be approved within the next year, Griebel laments that "stable applications based on this standard will need even more time to mature."
Sidebar:
Fibre channel provides comfort zone for Merck & Co.
Merck & Co. Inc., headquartered in Whitehouse Station, N.J. is committed to Fibre Channel. Merck is a worldwide research-intensive company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets human and animal health products and services. The company's sales last year were valued at $40.36 billion, and net income was valued at $6.821 billion.
Christian Griebel works for Merck KGaA, in Darmstadt, Germany. Specifically, he works in the Systems Management area within Bio and Chemoinformatics, "Bio and chemoinformatics are very compute- and storage-intensive challenges in modern drug discovery," he says. "Since Fibre Channel reached the mainstream market, we decided to make it a prerequisite for any new storage appliance. Because there is no rock-solid standard for inter-vendor communications and management inside a switched fabric, we're currently just buying Fibre Channel storage but are not deploying a real SAN. After we are sure that hardware and software work with SANs as easily as they do with Ethernet today, we will definitely implement a SAN."
Griebel says that since Merck is in constant need of raw performance power, Network Attached Storage (NAS) was never a viable option. "Our Fibre Channel-based storage currently comprises of nearly 750GB and continues growing at about 100% every 18 to 24 months," he says.
One way Merck KGaA keeps up with the constant storage demand is by implementing the MegaRam-5000 solid state disk from Imperial Technology Inc., El Segundo, Calif. MegaRam-5000 utilizes a native Fibre Channel architecture and is currently being used in Merck KGaA's production area with an Oracle database, which is writing its transaction logs onto it.
"Since we were logsync-bound, this greatly improved our data entry mechanism, raising performance of inserts/updates by about 70%," says Griebel.
Griebel says he looks forward to evaluating the Fibre Alliance SNMP-based MIB and Fabric Shortest Path First routing protocol. One of the biggest challenges for him has been the lack of a plug-and-play option at the physical transport level. "Here we're waiting for unified standards from the most important vendors," he says. "The lack of a reliable inter-switch protocol has prevented us from deploying a SAN in our largely heterogeneous environment. In a switched fabric, the inter-switch links quickly become bottlenecks.
"As a result, we need an efficient routing protocol for large and distributed sites. We're evaluating the market continuously, and currently leaning towards a Fibre Channel director-class switch. This would save us a lot of the cabling a meshed fabric would require and provide the same level of fault tolerance and performance.
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