Roles of smart switches in virtual storage

The technology of the smart switch that appears on the market is very mature. The following article will mainly introduce the performance and characteristics of the mainstream smart switches in the market, virtual Storage Technology is undoubtedly a hot topic in recent years, in traditional host manufacturers.

In addition to disk array manufacturers and backup software manufacturers, there are also a new generation of smart switches that are particularly prominent, and products have been launched under the standard of 2 GB fiber channel protocol, it has a place in current storage virtualization products and solutions.

As we all know, in traditional SAN storage networks, Fiber Channel Protocol switches not only occupy the core of the network in the network topology, but also are the core equipment of the SAN storage network in a practical sense, first of all, the Optical Fiber Channel Protocol makes the SAN network accessible;

In the SAN network, the smart switch layer must provide sufficient ports for the front-end host and the back-end disk array to achieve the network topology. This "enough" has two meanings, first, the number of ports required by the Host channel must be sufficient, and second, there is no bandwidth bottleneck in the network (from the host to the disk array. On this basis, the developed smart switch achieves storage virtualization, which is more advantageous than disk array-based storage virtualization. See.

There are many virtualization devices and solutions at the network layer. In particular, cisco mds and maxxan mvx both define their own products as smart switches. There are other products, such as ibm svc, SVM, KASHYA, and MARANTI.

Similar products that are being developed by other well-known enterprises are also being followed up. Now let's take a look at the market prospects of such products. Every successful product or technology must be accepted by users, which is no exception to smart switch products. Chinese users have the following features:

1. users' decision makers are not technically competent. Therefore, on the one hand, they are superstitious about big brands, on the other hand, they are not easy to accept new products and technologies, and are unwilling to bear the technical risks brought about by the use of new products and technologies.

2. The relationship between manufacturers, integrators and users seriously affects users' attitudes towards different products and technologies.

3. National laws stipulate that public bidding is required for procurement projects with more than 0.5 million RMB. The competition in public bidding is fierce. The intensity of competition is proportional to the total amount of projects and the transparency of bidding, the more open the project, the more competitive the competition is. At the same time, there are still such phenomena in the current sales: storage devices are attached to server hosts, and optical fiber network devices are generally attached to storage devices.

According to these situations, before selling smart switch products, we must first face the huge pressure and blocking from host manufacturers, storage equipment manufacturers, and smart switch manufacturers. For example, although IBM has developed a SVC virtualization solution, IBM must provide key recommendations for its SHARK series storage products, and in any case, IBM will maintain the tone of promoting the SHARK series products, in some limited-investment projects, SVC will be promoted as an alternative to SHARK products and compete with products and solutions of other brands. Of course, other similar products do not have a gold icon like IBM, and they are only more passive in the competition.

Smart switch manufacturers must use strong marketing campaigns and partners closely related to users to persuade users to accept storage virtualization solutions based on smart switches, this solution is defined as a new target for the user's storage system and implemented as a specific technical standard.

In order to obtain the market's admission certificate, this step should catch up with host manufacturers such as HP and IBM, but also avoid EMC2, HDS and other disk array manufacturers, and these manufacturers master the mainstream products, technologies, services and other important resources are difficult for smart switch manufacturers that are difficult to provide even the successful cases that can be used for reference.

At the same time, the competition from similar products is even more severe. Traditional smart switch manufacturers such as BROCADE and MCDATE are bound to disk array manufacturers, which are rock-solid. cisco mds, maxxan mvx &; SA, SVM, ibm svc, MARANTI, fight for each other. Maybe when a user decides to adopt a storage virtualization solution based on smart switches, he will be surrounded by more manufacturers and sales representatives.

After analyzing the background, let's take a look at the specific project operations. According to the current national laws, more than 0.5 million of procurement projects must be open for bidding. In such projects that are lower than the bidding standard, the price of smart switch products is no longer comparable to that of traditional optical fiber switches, the prices of new full-featured products are far higher than those of mature simple products.

In medium-sized projects between 2 million and 0.5 million, the expensive price of middle-aged smart switch products still puts itself at a disadvantage. Even if users have fully accepted the virtual storage solution, they are willing to take technical risks, you can find that you must select between the network of the virtual storage and the disk array with higher performance.

After all, users' investment is limited, and the high performance of the disk array is a visible indicator. In contrast, various virtualization functions are not energy-oriented. Large projects will inevitably lead to fierce competition. large manufacturers will use brand advantages, public relations, service commitments, market reputation, and even political influence to compete for all the resources. In contrast, the initial smart switch will be ruthlessly eliminated in this competition, which has already been proved.

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