May 13, 2005

Storage Area Networking (SAN) is currently one of the most exciting, dynamic and fast-growing areas of network technology development worldwide.

The factors affecting the SAN market worldwide apply equally to the Asia Pacific region, where storage networking is experiencing tremendous growth.

News@Cisco spoke to Christian Hentschel, Cisco director of Advanced Technologies and Solutions in Asia Pacific, to gain further insight into the progress of the SAN market in the region.

How great is the penetration of SAN technologies across Asia Pacific?

Christian Hentschel: Market researcher IDC reports that SAN adoption is rising in the Asia Pacific region.

According to IDC, this is because users are facing the complex and costly task of managing multiple storage devices serving multiple operating system platforms and a diverse bag of applications, and they are now starting to consolidate their servers and storage.

IDC reports that in 2004, SANs and network-attached storage (NAS) solutions comprised 21.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively of the total enterprise storage market in Asia Pacific, and it sees this trend towards storage networking growing.

What are the main applications that SANs are used for?

Christian Hentschel: Two of the main applications for SANs are storage consolidation and business continuance. Leading IT organizations have realized significant benefits by migrating from direct-attached storage (DAS) to SAN.

This is because SANs allow a common pool of storage to be shared by any number of servers, thereby increasing disk utilization and decreasing management and backup expenses.

A study by McKinsey & Company and Merrill Lynch showed that management costs for networked storage are greatly reduced versus DAS. According to their report, centralized pooling of storage can achieve an 80 percent reduction in management expense.

Additionally, significant gains in disk utilization can be achieved. The average DAS utilization is approximately 50 percent, whereas networked storage commonly achieves utilization rates of 80 percent or higher.

Overall, the total cost of ownership for storage drops by more than 50 percent in a SAN topology. Operationally, another key driver of SANs is the ability to scale processing capability and storage resources independently.

Intelligent SANs also facilitate backup consolidation to tape and disk with Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) coupled with write and tape acceleration technologies. In addition, SAN is one of the key enablers for server consolidation because it decouples storage and servers so that they can grow independently of each other.

In addition to the clear gains associated with cost savings and increased productivity, business continuance strategies are greatly enhanced via SANs. The cost of downtime for business critical applications is significant.

Customers require solutions that will allow them to quickly recovery from any potential disruption. A storage network's ability to consolidate storage into a small number of pools results in simplified and more robust disaster recovery implementations

What is driving the increase in SAN use?

Christian Hentschel: Enterprises are increasingly dependent on timely and accurate information and the data volume in enterprises continues to grow in an exponential rate. Intelligent SANs help enterprises to organize and maximize their storage resources. In addition, SANs:

• Enable enterprises to achieve a lower total cost of ownership for their storage infrastructure.
• Provide enterprises with a strong business continuance strategy, especially with regulatory requirements mandating enterprises to implement disaster recovery solutions.
• Greatly facilitate disaster recovery implementations such as data replication for centralized backup and restore operations.
• Enable Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) so that as data ages it can be migrated to a less expensive class of storage.

How do Cisco SAN products stand out from those offered by other vendors?

Christian Hentschel: Cisco offers a unique blend of industry leading performance and functionality in a single platform with associated planning, design, implementation and optimization services and world-class technical support.

Technically, Cisco's SAN solutions offer the following:

• High performance, scalable hardware platforms with 1.44 Tbps backplanes that can support 1-, 2-, 4- and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel.
• Multi-protocol support covering Fibre Channel, iSCSI (Small Computer System Interface over IP), FCIP and FICON (IBM Fiber Connection).
• Integrated network-based storage applications such as volume management, data migration, continuous data protection and serverless backup.
• Advanced software capabilities such as VSAN (virtual storage area network), QoS (quality of service), SAN security, traffic management, inter-VSAN routing, FCIP write acceleration, tape acceleration, Logical Unit Number (LUN) zoning and data compression, encryption on FCIP tunnels and so on.

In addition, Cisco SAN solutions integrate tightly with other Cisco IP-based solutions to provide business -ready data center infrastructures.

What is the Cisco strategy for SAN development and support in Asia Pacific?

Christian Hentschel: Cisco will continue to innovate in technologies such as the advanced software that solves customers' real business problems. Cisco will continue to execute a storage networking strategy driving towards a Multilayer Storage Utility Model.

The Multilayer Storage Utility Model combines advanced storage switching with network-hosted storage services to provide unparalleled ease of management, scalability, and functionality.

Driving this level of intelligence and performance into the storage network gives Multilayer Storage Utilities a significantly lower total cost of ownership than the already considerably lower total cost of ownership of SANs.