The Optical Side of Storage

If recent alliances are any indication, optical networking has become an attractive alternative for users eager to push storage traffic across multiple sites.

Three optical networking vendors, ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, and Nortel, recently turned up on the EMC Select Partner Program, which is eyed as an industry coup among suppliers.

Membership in EMC Select is viewed as practically a guarantee of bigger sales for any vendor. It means EMC will actively peddle specific wares to its own customers to flesh out implementations, and support those products as "solution completers." Since there are only 14 vendors on the list, it's considered an elite club. (See EMC to Resell Decru, NeoScale.)

Which makes it even more interesting to see the sudden proliferation of optical solutions -- all billed by EMC as "distance extension for EMC remote replication and data mobility software as well as the EMC CLARiiON Disk Library".

Here's a rundown of what's being offered by EMC:

What's the optical fascination? There are several answers. First, the advent of new, low-cost pluggable optics has enabled suppliers to replace big, honking, and expensive chassis with small and sprightly optical gear. This has lowered the barriers that formerly kept optical networking out of the hands of all but carriers and the largest enterprises. Further, burgeoning levels of storage is making it imperative for customers to find bigger bandwidth links between remote sites, particularly in the financial and healthcare industries.

"Wave-division multiplexing is now cost effective for companies with just two or three services," says Paul Schoenau, product manager for channels at Ciena. Formerly, an enterprise usually needed to have at least 10 distinct applications to cost-justify the purchase of an optical networking platform that would put each app on a separate wavelength -- a cutoff that made optical storage part of metro services from carriers.

Now, equipment like Ciena's CN 4200 can run multiple protocols on one wavelength, in boxes that are dramatically cheaper than optical gear used to be.

EMC says there's growing interest among enterprise customers in optical networking. "By offering this technology through EMC Select, we're able to provide our customers with distance extension technology for their ESCON, Fibre Channel, FICON or Gigabit Ethernet networks as they implement business continuity and disaster recovery solutions across metro and regional areas," writes EMC spokesman Rick LaCroix in an email.

Puzzlingly, though, none of the optical vendors can produce any specific customers who are using their gear through EMC Select. ADVA and Ciena claim it's too soon to tell. Nortel couldn't be reached at press time. But at least one ADVA customer says approval by EMC was key to his organization's continuing use of optical gear from that vendor. "We use WDM between sites for more bandwidth, but also to run multiple protocols," says Chuck Simet, network engineer with the Networking and Technical Services Group of the Catholic Health Systems of Buffalo, N.Y. He notes that several EMC SANs generate only part of the traffic that the hospital system runs on optical links, but even so, it was important that each SAN and Fibre Channel switch vendor be compatible with the ADVA gear. "We knew this was coming... Now we know they have a stamp of approval from EMC and that if we have any problem, there won't be any vendor finger pointing."

For another customer, optical networking has more appeal than gigabit Ethernet. Phil Skinner, director of telecommunications at Ohio State University Medical Center, says he "definitely" thinks optical networking presents an advantage for storage traffic, particularly "when you are talking very large amounts of data or even transfers over long ranges versus relying on standard Ethernet technology."

Another storage user, though, says he's not interested in using optical networking for storage, because he's having good luck with gigabit Ethernet over copper. "We use optical networks between sites, but no, I'm not interested in adding more of it for storage," said the senior technical support analyst at a multinational tire company.

Still, the promotion by EMC and its partners is bound to drum up some additional business. And there are other companies working the optical/storage angle as well. Packetlight, an optical and Sonet networking startup that specializes in storage transport, recently forged a resale agreement with IBM, and new CEO Coby Hanoch says he's trying to get in with EMC as well.

Hanoch says many companies are looking to use optical storage to improve links beween sites, but there is also lots of interest among service providers looking to win business from SMBs. "They seem them as a great potential market," he insists. Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

Companies mentioned in this article: