Smart Moves: Selling IP SANs to Fibre Channel Customers

Fibre Channel SAN deployment is right on track in large corporate data centers. Customers understand the high value of storage networking and are willing to devote significant resources to installing and maintaining their SANs. The VARs and system integrators who sell, plan, install and maintain Fibre Channel SANs do well in this high-margin market and have little interest in upsetting the apple cart. However, though Fibre Channel SANs still rule the data center roost, IP SANs are coming on fast. Fueled by iSCSI, most IP storage networking configurations are less expensive and complex than Fibre Channel SANs, and are familiar to IT administrators who cut their eyeteeth on IP networks. VARs understandably see IP SANs competing with their lucrative Fibre Channel contracts.

However, IP SANs are a much greater opportunity to Fibre Channel VARs than a threat, because they are not Fibre Channel SAN replacements, but complements. The corporations keep Fibre Channel SANs in their data centers for high-end storage processing, and install IP SANs in remote offices to replace DAS (direct-attached storage). By installing IP SANs at remote offices, departments and workgroups, SAN customers can better utilize enterprise resources and improve distributed backup policies to protect critical data across the enterprise.

Market Opportunity
Fibre Channel SANs are firmly ensconced in the corporate data center and won't be replaced by another storage technology any time soon. So many IP SAN vendors are looking to the mid-tier and SME (small enterprise) space as natural customers, since compact and economical IP-based SANs are ideally suited to these environments. However, IP SAN vendors are finding a difficult adoption barrier: convincing these businesses that they need storage networking in the first place. This is not a significant barrier at large enterprises that already fun Fibre Channel SANs. These businesses already believe in the power of storage networking and distributed backup. Since these customers are already convinced, they are quicker to recognize the advantages of storage networking for their remote offices. But for all these advantages, installing and maintaining Fibre Channel SANs at multiple remote offices is too costly and time-consuming. The required capital, ongoing expense and management complexity are better suited for large corporate data centers and their staffs.

Enter the economical IP SAN. Installing these storage area networks at the remote office level represents an excellent business deal for the customers, who can leverage their Fibre Channel SANs, use storage networking throughout the enterprise, and enjoy IP SANs' lower cost and familiar administration. VARs benefit even though IP SANs bring in a lower margin than the more expensive Fibre Channel SANs, because the IP SANs represent a much higher volume and far less resource consumption. VARs and their customers can have the best of both worlds by retaining Fibre Channel SAN services and supplementing these high margin activities with lower margin, high volume IP SAN installations in remote offices, workgroups and departments. IP SANs are perfectly suited to these environments because of their excellent ROI on the local level, and their important role in distributed data protection across the enterprise.

ROI - Local and Enterprise
Fibre Channel SAN customers may be sold on the concept of storage networking's benefits, but they do need a compelling ROI (return on investment) to extend storage networking to remote offices. Good storage networking ROI happens at both the local and enterprise levels: IP SANs relieve storage administration chores and overburdened IT staffs at remote offices, and they also allow remote offices to integrate their data protection procedures with corporate's.

Local offices often struggle with overloaded storage assets, overprovisioning, and overburdened storage staffs. Those resources all come out of the company pocket, contributing to a dip in the bottom line. Using IP SANs to consolidate and optimize storage assets, remote-office IT staff can significantly lower storage acquisition costs and on-going support needs. An IP SAN can aggregate data using a metadata model, virtualizing the storage network and presenting a common storage pool. This allows IT to hide complex physical data views under logical data views, which benefits end users and frees unused storage resources and disk space. Without provisioning tools, IT struggles to manage dispersed storage assets by tracking multiple versions of applications, data sets, operating systems and service packs. IP SANs show an immediate return on investment because they build on an IP knowledge base, leverage existing investments, and provision storage assets.

Virtualize storage assets. Provisioning data storage is a challenge, as IT administrators struggle to provide and manage storage for fast-growing data stores. IP SAN virtualization tools help by aggregating the data stored on disk and presenting it to end-users as logical data volumes. Virtualization also helps storage administrators to better manage their storage, benefiting disaster recovery and business continuance applications such as backup and restore, mirroring, replication and snapshots.

Distributed backup strategies are an excellent approach in theory, but deploying them is another matter. By installing IP SANs at remote offices, businesses can efficiently protect data throughout the enterprise. IP SANs shine in remote data protection, since IP has no inherent distance limitations. For example, when a remote office is backing up to an IP SAN instead of twenty different DAS devices, it becomes much easier to back the SAN storage up to regional, national or international backup sites. Business can also use their remote IP SANs as mirroring and backup sites for front office data: using dedicated lines and TCP/IP, businesses copy primary data from critical production databases to remote site secondary servers, which then back up to their local IP SAN. This level of data protection is not possible with DAS-based storage schemes, and is tricky and expensive with Fibre Channel SANs. Fibre Channel allows metro-area distance transfers, but beyond that requires expensive signal-boosting devices over fiber. IP SANs can enable data replication from the primary data center to a remote location hundreds or thousands of miles away.

IP-based storage area networks provide the storage mapping layer between the physical storage volumes and server requests. By using IP SAN configurations such as StoneFly Network's Storage Concentrators, businesses can move storage intelligence to the network core, consolidate disk management features to fully utilize physical disk resources, incorporate hierarchical storage management, and enable local and remote online data access for shorter backup windows and faster restore times. Far from being a competition to Fibre Channel SANs, IP SANs fit perfectly into the enterprise. IP SANs represent excellent opportunities for storage networking VARs to sell more storage area networks to their existing SAN customers.

About the Author
Yuhas brings extensive experience in the

information processing industry, having managed sales, marketing, and customer support organizations at the national and international levels for both hardware and software products. Prior to joining StoneFly, Yuhas served as senior vice president of worldwide sales, channel development, and customer support for the Storage Systems Division at LSI Logic. Yuhas also served as vice president of worldwide sales and channel marketing for start-up companies RadioLAN, a wireless networking company, and Ridge Technologies (which was later acquired by Adaptec), a developer of large scale RAID storage subsystems. He also held the positions of senior vice president of worldwide sales and channel marketing at Storage Dimensions, a manufacturer of high-capacity, fault-tolerant disk array subsystems, and senior vice president of worldwide sales and customer support at QMS, a manufacturer of sophisticated network printing systems. Yuhas attended

the University of Georgia, and holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics and English from the University of South Alabama.

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