They expect to deliver products in the second quarter of 2001. Other vendors are addressing customer reluctance to change their existing infrastructures by examining ways of exploiting existing network architectures. Whichever IP specification emerges as the de facto standard, Fibre Channel will no longer have a monopoly as the technology for distributed storage. Using IP will give companies the option of a variety of network transports or interconnects for building SANs. Paul von Stamwitz, principal engineer at Adaptec, says, 'Fibre Channel is not the solution.
SANs are the solution.
Predictably, the fly in the ointment is a lack of standards. Obviously, if we go in five different ways, that is not good. But in the end, reason will prevail. Fibre Channel SANs carry storage data over a separate network. IP storage network solutions can carry storage traffic over existing enterprise networks, relying on higher performance Ethernet technology and quality of service measures to avoid reducing the performance of other applications.