Report: SAN Routing Hype Won't Help

With standards still years from ratification, the storage routing market is a muddle of proprietary technologies and misinformation, according to the latest Byte and Switch Insider, this publication's paid subscription research service.

Yet the technology promises to solve points so painful to customers that they're willing to wade through lots of hype if it means eventually finding a solution. And some vendors, mindful that confusion doesn't make traction, are starting to sacrifice marketspeak to potential opportunities.

The report, "Storage Routing Unmasked," says the proliferation of storage networking has forced customers to find ways to make sense of numerous "SAN islands" that have cropped up in their organizations. SAN routing -- a misnomer, since it doesn't connote the same kind of function that takes place in IP routers -- alleviates some trouble by allowing interconnected SANs to share resources while keeping segments to manageable size.

There are just a handful of devices that really do this. Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), LightSand Communications Corp., and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) currently lead the market. Others claim similar functionality, but in fact perform different functions.

As a result, the "SAN routing market" includes SAN routers, SAN extension equipment, bridges/multiprotocol switches, and application-enhanced switches.Some players are starting to back off from the general mystification that's prevailed till now. EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), for instance, no longer insists its Storage Router is really a router. Instead, it's talking about it as a virtualization appliance (see When a Router's Not a Router and EMC Takes Storage Router for a Spin). By the time the product becomes generally available, it could very well have a new name.

Agreeing on common terminology is just part of the problem, however. Each of the storage router vendors uses its own technique to segment SANs. And it usually doesn't meld with those of its rivals (see Bharti Infotel Picks Tellabs, McData Extends Router Family, and Brocade Ships Multiprotocol Router).

Two pending standards from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) provide hope for interoperability among SAN routers. However, neither offers immediate help. The Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) is in development and focuses on standardizing the interfaces between networked storage devices and applications; APIs are due this summer. The Fibre Channel - Inter-Fabric Routing (FC-IFR) standard, which targets routing more directly, was recently proposed and is due for initial public review in October 2006.

Bottom line? Immature technology and lack of standards have caused significant divisions in the storage router market. But in spite of this, customers' need to simplify management and streamline the use of SANs is forcing suppliers to start making sense in order to make money.

The report looks at products from public companies:

Private vendors mentioned include:

Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch