Analysis of market predicament of domestic intelligent switch

Virtual storage technology is undoubtedly a hot technology in recent years, in addition to the traditional host manufacturers, disk array manufacturers and backup software manufacturers, there are a particularly prominent new generation of products, intelligent switches, and has been in the 2GB Fibre Channel protocol standards under the launch of the product, in the current storage virtualization products and solutions to occupy a niche.

It is well known that in traditional SAN storage networks, Fibre Channel protocol switches not only occupy the core of the network in the network topology, but also, in fact, the core equipment of the SAN storage network, first of all, the Fibre Channel protocol has made the San network, which is called with, and the hair is attached; You must ensure that you have sufficient ports in the switch layer for the front-end host and the back-end disk array to implement the network topology. This "enough" has two levels of meaning, one is the number of ports required by the host channel must be sufficient, the second is in the network (from the host to the disk array) without bandwidth bottlenecks. Based on this, the developed intelligent switch realizes the storage virtualization, which is more advantageous than the disk array based storage virtualization. See the figure below.

Now there are many virtualization devices and solutions at the network level, especially Cisco MDS and Maxxan MVX that define their products as intelligent switches. There are other products, such as IBM Svc,svm,kashya,maranti and so on, and by other well-known companies are developing similar products are also in intensive follow-up, now we look at the market prospects for such products.

Each successful product or technology must be accepted by the user, which is no exception to the smart switch product, and Chinese users have this feature:
1, the user decision-makers in the technical perspective of professional quality, so they superstitious big brand, on the one hand not easy to accept new products and technology, not willing to assume the use of new products and new technology to bring the technical risks.
2, manufacturers, integrators and users of the relationship seriously affect the user's attitude to different products and technologies.
3, the national law stipulates that more than 500,000 yuan of procurement items must be open to tender, and open tender competition is very fierce, this intensity and the total amount of the project and tender transparency in direct proportion, the larger the project, the more open the project, the competition is extremely fierce. At the same time, there is still a phenomenon in current sales: storage devices are attached to server hosts, and fiber-optic network devices are more commonly attached to storage devices.

According to these circumstances, before selling intelligent switch products, we must first face the huge pressure and blockade from host manufacturer, storage device manufacturer and fiber switch manufacturer. IBM, for example, has developed an SVC virtualization solution, but IBM is bound to recommend its shark series storage offerings, and in any event IBM will maintain the tone of the Shark series, In some projects with limited investment, SVC is promoted as an alternative to shark products and competes with other brand products and solutions. Of course, other similar products do not have such a brand as IBM, its only more passive in the competition.

Smart switch manufacturers must persuade users to accept storage virtualization solutions based on intelligent switches through strong marketing and joint user-close partners, and define such solutions as new targets for user storage systems and implement specific technical standards to obtain market access certificates. But this step to catch up with HP,IBM and other host manufacturers, but also to avoid EMC2,HDS and other disk array manufacturers, and these manufacturers master the mainstream products, technology, services and other important resources, for even the success of the case can not be provided by intelligent switch manufacturers, this is how difficult.

At the same time, competition from similar products is more severe, traditional fiber-optic switch manufacturers such as brocade,mcdate-bound disk array manufacturers, rock solid, Ii Penrau CISCO mds,maxxan mvx &; sa,svm,ibm Svc,maranti, Each other, the beacon signals. Perhaps when a user decides to adopt a storage virtualization solution based on an intelligent switch, he will be surrounded by more manufacturers ' sales reps.

After analyzing these backgrounds, we will look at the specific projects that can be carried out. Under current national law, more than 500,000 per cent of procurement projects must be publicly tendered, so that in projects below bidding standards, smart switch products have lost comparable prices compared to traditional fibre switches, and the prices of new, fully functional products are certainly much higher than those of mature simple products. In medium-sized projects between 2 million and 500,000, the high price of middle-aged switch products is still at a disadvantage, even if the user has fully embraced the virtual storage solution and is willing to take technical risks, Once you have a purchase, they will find that the user must choose between a virtual storage network and a more high-performance disk array, after all, the user's investment is limited, and the performance of the disk array is seen, compared to the various functions of virtualization is not quantified. Large projects are bound to cause white-hot competition, large manufacturers will use brand advantages, public relations, service commitment, market reputation, and even political influence all resources to compete. By contrast, the fledgling smart switch will be ruthlessly phased out in such competition, as has been demonstrated by the fact.