Application Note: Expanding Storage Service Provider Connectivity Solutions
Introduction
Storage Service Providers (SSPs) located in co-location facilities offer a crucial value-added service to enterprise customers: off-site data storage and data storage management for businesses. Most SSP services, however, are currently targeted towards the tenants of the co-location facility using Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Networks (SANs). Extending the reach of SANs to the enterprise data center offers new market opportunities for the SSP and significant cost savings to the enterprise customer. This application note explores the connectivity solutions required to provide necessary access from the co-located SSP to the enterprise data center.
The Opportunity
Internet access and e-commerce have become integral parts of today's modern business practices. Interruptions in the IT infrastructure supporting these activities can have very negative effects on an enterprise's profitability and competitive position. This dependence on non-stop information availability has businesses increasingly looking to SSPs to solve more complex problems such as disaster recovery for business continuance.
Enterprises have several motivations for using an SSP for remote storage applications:
- Online storage of business-critical data speeds the disaster recovery process, should it be needed.
- Overall system reliability is increased with data replication and equipment redundancy at a remote location.
- Cost reductions can be realized through storage pooling and resource consolidation.
SSPs offer a multitude of service offerings to the enterprise customer, all in a pay-as-you-go model that offers scalability, reliability and availability to the enterprise customer.
The Challenge
In order to provide online storage solutions to the enterprise, the SSP must be able to connect the enterprise to the co-location facility without compromising security, performance, availability or reliability.
Until recently, inter-site connectivity options were limited and cost prohibitive. But recent technology advances have given IT manager's additional connectivity options that offer more bandwidth and greater reach at significantly lower costs. Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) services are now available from a number of different IP service providers, offering alternatives to existing telco-based services. Additionally, carriers leasing dark fiber and Packet-Over-SONET (POS) offerings are providing additional choices for the SSP. The technology challenge is to extend the reach of Fibre Channel SANs by utilizing the IP network infrastructure between the enterprise end-users and the SSP's co-location facility.
Storage Service Provider
SSPs can offer competitive prices by providing a variety of storage-related services to multiple customers in a geographically central area - utilizing, for example, a single pair of fibers to service multiple customers with remote storage. The customer can store their data on their own devices hosted and managed by the SSP. One of the challenges is how to minimize the costs of connectivity. While many business districts have a web of unlit (unused) fiber optic cables already installed, this fiber may be owned by others and only available through lease. Being able to carry the maximum amount of revenue traffic while leasing the minimum amount of fiber is a key part of the business proposition for the SSP.
Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) offers a highly economical solution by allowing different wavelengths of light to carry separate data traffic streams on a single optical fiber pair. This approach provides benefits to both the service provider and the enterprise user. The service provider gets an excellent return on investment, since a minimal incremental equipment investment (simply adding additional wavelengths) allows additional storage (or data) traffic to be carried over the same leased pair of optical fibers. Users benefit since their data moves to and from the SSP's remote facilities at full wire speed.
Both service providers and users can enjoy these benefits today by using equipment available from LuxN for optical aggregation and trans port, and SAN Valley Systems' Storage Area Network-Internet Protocol gateways. With this equipment pairing, an enterprise's Fibre Channel SANs can be connected at full wire speed over distances of up to 100km (62 miles), significantly extending the reach of natively connected Fibre Channel devices.
Case Study
Company A has kept their data storage/backup in-house at the enterprise IT facility at their headquarters location. Their growing online business, supported by internal Web servers and a Gigabit Ethernet-based data backbone, has resulted in a doubling of their data storage requirements twice in the last year, causing spiraling costs, service disruptions and draining their limited IT resources. As a result, Company A decided to outsource the expansion of their centralized storage to an SSP.
The SSP provided a high-speed bandwidth pipeline by using LuxN's WavSystemTM product set which used wave division multiplexing to aggregate multiple wavelengths (i.e. services) onto a single pair of fibers. They also used SAN Valley's SL1000 IP-SAN Gateway to optimize data traffic across the extended distance. By pairing the SL1000 IP-SAN Gateway and WavSystem products, both the SSP and the customer were able to leverage the existing network infrastructure, IT team and management tools to provide extended services far beyond the data center walls.
SAN Valley's SL1000 IP-SAN Gateway connects to the GbE ports of the LuxN WDM equipment allowing full wire speed data transfer without the speed degradation normally associated with long distance storage data connections. The SL1000 adds advanced traffic shaping and superior Quality of Service to the storage data network providing a highly configurable and easily manageable network.
The LuxN WavSystem supports multiplexing of up to 16 wavelengths (i.e. 16 applications) and, because of its modular design, the SSP only needed to purchase channel capacity appropriate to its current customer needs. Additionally, the LuxN equipment is a Layer 1, 'protocol-independent' device. Additional traffic from other customers can be easily accommodated should the SSP wish to support other protocols, including OC-3/ 12/48, and legacy traffic such as 10/100 Ethernet or T1. For added security and network resiliency, the LuxN solution offers optical path protection. This feature allows automatic switchover in less than 25ms, should a fiber break occur.
Company A was able to manage their data using best of breed services and equipment from experts in the field of storage and storage management - the SSP - while enjoying the benefits of secure, offsite data replication, backup and data storage at the remote data storage facility.
About LuxN
LuxN is a leading provider of multi-service, intelligent, optical access network platforms. LuxN solutions enable local service providers to cost-effectively extend their managed optical networks from metropolitan points of presence to enterprise customer premises. The company was founded in 1998 and funded by prominent IT venture partners including New Enterprise Associates, US Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Azure Capital Partners and Credit Suisse First Boston Private Equity. Additional funding was received through corporate partnerships with Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Siemens. LuxN was awarded ISO 9001 certification in August 2000 in recognition of the rigorous quality standards set and achieved during the development of its optical access network products. For more information, visit the LuxN website at www.luxn.com or call 408-328-4500.
About SAN Valley Systems
SAN Valley Systems delivers high performance Internet SAN connectivity solutions into enterprise, service provider and carrier markets worldwide. SAN Valley develops and markets networking solutions that interconnect storage resources across IP and Optical networks. SAN Valley's next-generation, IP-Storage products deliver powerful, high-performance connectivity that address common storage challenges encountered by today's enterprise and service provider customers. SAN Valley's products interoperate with best of breed networking, SAN and optical technologies, to provide end-to-end storage networking solutions. Our products provide investment protection by reducing the cost and complexity of deploying and managing mission critical storage services.
SAN Valley, based in Campbell, Calif., is a privately held company, with funding from Moore Capital, Upstart Capital, Vertex Management, Innovacom Venture Capital, Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) and Cisco Systems (NSDQ: CSCO). More information about SAN Valley can be found at www.sanvalley.com.
SAN Valley Systems