Reyes: DAS Is Dead

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Within five years, all enterprise data will be networked.

Thats what Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) CEO Greg Reyes predicted here today in his Storage Network World keynote on the future of connectivity. Reyes says DAS will be obsolete by 2010, and nobody will choose between Fibre Channel and IP or block-and-file data within five years.

“All enterprise data will be networked,” Reyes said. "Why? Why would I want to have my data captive to a single set of servers? It’s crazy. And its death will be accelerated by the emergence of blade servers.”

The switch vendor boss says external storage will proliferate as blade servers gain in popularity, because “they mandate external storage. Blade servers have no disk, they must have external storage.”

Fibre Channel and IP will blend as SAN routers proliferate and 10-Gbit/s Ethernet spurs growth of that alternative protocol.“We’ll see the unification of the SAN architecture. It won’t be Fibre Channel or IP -- it will be Fibre Channel and IP, and the underlying protocol will be inconsequential.”

He believes the same goes for block-and-file data. As Fibre Channel and IP coexist, so will NAS and SAN converge.

“Any service will have access to block data regardless of where it resides. The concept of having storage captive to a single NAS head will not be a thing of the future."

Reyes sees two hot trends driving user demand next year: the “intersection of utility computing and ILM... Utility computing is a metaphor for simple provisioning, and ILM is a metaphor for automating data movement.”

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0