Storage In the Spotlight
Luca Cafiero, senior vice president and general manager of the Storage Technology Group at Cisco Systems, told attendees that SANs still have a long way to go in evolving from their current state,which he described as local SANs,to a true global SAN. Adding intelligence to the network will spur the emergence of global SANs, he said.
"The moment you have an intelligent SAN, a lot of services can migrate there from the server and storage sides," Cafiero said.
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CA's Nigel Turner promotes vendor's vision of a shared pool storage model.
Though Cisco has a good storage message, the networking hardware vendor remains in catch-up mode, said William Allen, president of ESS, a Westlake Village, Calif.-based solution provider. Many vendors are moving to add intelligence to the storage network, but most solutions today are still host-based, he said.
"Adding intelligence to the network benefits end users and enables them to better manage their data flow," Allen said. "But Brocade started early, doing the things Cisco ignored. I'm glad to see [Cisco] coming back."
For its part, Computer Associates International is driving an on-demand storage model, which will make capacity available as needed from a centrally managed pool of platform- and vendor-independent storage resources, said Nigel Turner, senior vice president for storage brand management at CA. The shared pool model also promotes the implementation of quality-of-service guarantees, he said.
"We have to be able to provision storage as needed, but we must also provide security, charge-back policies and so on automatically," said Turner.
On the security side, W. Curtis Preston, president of The Storage Group, an Oceanside, Calif.-based consulting firm, said large and small businesses can survive a disaster by being prepared.
The first step is to assign each data type a monetary value that can be compared with the cost of a data backup system, Preston said. The next step is to ensure that all data,especially database backup catalogs,is backed up. And instead of listing the data to be backed up, businesses should list the data to be excluded, he said.