NetApp has become the first vendor to pledge native support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in a storage array during a press conference with FCoE networking partners.
Joel Reich, VP of NetApp's SANiSAN unit, said NetApp FAS and V series storage systems will support Cisco's Nexus 5020 FCoE switch, and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) from QLogic and Emulex. EMC Monday said it would resell the Cisco switch and the QLogic and Emulex CNAs, but NetApp is going one step farther with FCoE cards in its arrays. Reich said the native FCoE will be available by the end of the year.
"If you have a NetApp system, FCoE will work with an FCoE target card," he said, adding that he expects the FCoE card to cost roughly the same as an 8 Gbps FC card.
Storage vendors are in two camps regarding FCoE. Cisco is the loudest of a small group that claim the technology is ready to go, even though standards for FCoE and the Data Center Ethernet it is built on aren't yet complete.
Cisco claims 100 customers for its FCoE Nexus 5000 switch. Jackie Ross, marketing VP of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization unit, said she expects production deployments in the first quarter of next year.
Cisco's FC switch rival Brocade says deployment of the technology is much farther off because of cost and lack of standards and customer interest, and hasn't yet released its FCoE switch or CNAs.
Other storage system vendors apparently agree with Brocade, although they are preparing their support for FCoE. "Watch this space," IBM chief technical strategist Clod Barrera said about IBM's FCoE plans. Barrera said FCoE will have a "significant impact in the longer run," but IBM customers show only a "tiny bit" of interest now. "Most customers aren't really on this page yet," he said.
Dell director of enterprise storage Praveen Asthana, whose company sells iSCSI systems and partners with EMC on FC systems, said "we'll support FCoE, but it's hard to find customers really clamoring for it."
A NetApp customer, Dow Chemical senior systems administrator Steve Remsing, said during an SNW presentation, "We're keeping an eye on the FCoE space, but it it's not quite there yet."
TheInfoPro's Managing Director of Storage Research Rob Stevenson said TIP's latest wave of market research shows a strong interest in FCoE among enterprise storage executives, but they're looking at it for 2010.
NetApp's Reich said one of the key drivers will be support for all the operating system vendors. "The most activity around FCoE will be as a proof of concept until March," he said. "You'll see some leading edge adopters, but in the second half of next year we'll start seeing customer deployments."
In other news ...
Copan Systems is bringing out a virtual tape library (VTL) for remote offices. The Copan 100T Remote Office VTL stores data and sends it back to a Copan 300T VTL in the data center. The Remote Office VTL uses the same data deduplication software as the 300T and encrypts data in route to the data center. Unlike other Copan products, the 100T VTL does not support MAID. The unit ships in capacities of 38 TB, 120 TB and 240 TB.
Archiving platform stores unstructured data as objects
Tarmin Technologies is coming out of stealth with GridBank, a software-based archiving and data migration product for object-based storage. GridBank stores unstructured content, such as Microsoft Office documents, PST files, images and video files, as objects. Administrators can set retention, security and access policies, including automatic migration across storage tiers as files age. GridBank also includes what Tarmin describes as a "Google-like" search engine.
FalconStor supports Windows failover clusters
FalconStor has added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering to its FalconStor NSS software, which replicates data to remote sites. Integration with Windows 2008's failover cluster allows FalconStor NSS to protect Hyper-V virtual machines configured in clusters.
Bocada upgrades data protection manager
Version 5.3 of Bocada's Enterprise data protection management software adds reporting capabilities and support for the latest versions of EMC Networker, Symantec PureDisk and Backup Exec, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, CommVault Galaxy Data Protection and IBM TSM. Bocada also announced general availability of Bocada Centralized Manager 2.5 for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM 2007) and added reporting capabilities for Quest Software's Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange.
Permabit gets Symantec certification
Permabit said its Permabit Enterprise Archive has been certified as interoperable with Symantec's Enterprise Vault archiving platform. Permabit's disk-based archiving product completed testing through the Symantec Technology Enabled Program.