The term “vendor lock-in” is rarely used in a good way by storage buyers. It usually means you’re stuck with products from one vendor, making it difficult to switch if you’re unhappy or something better comes along.

Still, with probably more options for storage products than ever before, most companies still buy all their primary storage from one vendor. That’s according to a Forrester report, “Consolidate Storage Vendors to Reduce Complexity,” released this week.

A Forrester survey of 170 companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises in North America and Europe found that more than 80 percent bought their primary storage from one vendor over the last year. That includes 64 percent of the companies with more than 500 TB of raw storage.

The report, written by analyst Andrew Reichman, says using more than one primary storage vendor can make it more complex to manage, provision and support the storage environment. And while using multiple vendors can often bring better pricing, buying from one vendor can result in volume discounts.

“You may have tried to contain costs by forcing multiple incumbent vendors to continuously compete against each other, with price as the primary differentiator,” Reichman writes. “This strategy can reduce prices and limit vendor lock-in, but it can also lead to management complexity and poor capacity utilization.”

The report recommends keeping things simple by and using fewer vendors when possible. However, that advice comes with several caveats: buying all storage from one vendor means taking the bad with the good, and some vendors’ product families differ so much “they may as well come from different vendors.”

Of course, I’m sure there are horror stories out there from organizations that have had bad experience with lock-in as well as those who’ve had incompatibility issues with products from multiple vendors.

Fibre Channel vendors aren’t the only ones pushing the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard designed to help Fibre Channel devices take advantage of 10-gig Ethernet.  Intel is also getting into the game, with an FCoE Linux initiator.

Intel this week released an open source FCoE initiator that it will maintain on http://www.open-fcoe.org/. The FCoE initiator will work the way iSCSI initiators wok on current IP SANs. By going open source instead of developing the initiators for its own products, Intel hopes to accelerate the availability of FCoE by getting feedback from the Linux community. Intel storage planner and technologist Jordan Plawner said the goal is for Linux servers to ship FCoE-ready, just as they ship with iSCSI inititators today.  

“We believe 10-gig Ethernet provides an opportunity to converge SAN and LAN traffic,” Plawner said. “We’ll continue to support iSCSI, but FCoE makes it easier to connect Ethernet into Fibre Channel SANs.”

That’s the party line for Fibre Channel vendors, and one that iSCSI SAN proponents dispute. Like iSCSI vendors, Intel is looking at it from the Ethernet side - but Plawner said FCoE will be better suited than iSCSI to take advantage of the coming Enhanced Ethernet spec. Enhanced Ethernet is a new version in the works that boosts Ethernet’s performance to make it more suitable to run storage.

“It’s much easier to adopt FCoE for Enhanced Ethernet,” Plawner said. “iSCSI is Ethernet end to end, so you would need a completely new subnet because you need Enhanced Ethernet on every node. With FCoE, just the first server and first top-of-the-rack-switch needs Enhanced Ethernet.”

Intel is looking to put FCoE Linux initiators on adapter cards that will work with FCoE switches in 2008. Plawner says he expects FCoE-enabled switches from Brocade and Cisco in the second half of next year, and he thinks companies will deploy FCoE in their networks by the end of 2008.

Plawner’s time frame is even more optimistic than that of some Fibre Channel storage vendors backing FCoE. Brocade execs says they don’t expect adoption until 2009, and they don’t think widescale adoption will arrive before 2010. But Brocade pledges to support FCoE in the DCX backbone director it will launch next year. Cisco’s FCoE switches are expected from Nuova Systems, which is 80 percent owned by Cisco. Nuova has yet to give product details, but industry sources say it will likely have FCoE switches or cards that plug into Cisco MDS switches early next year.

Here is a more detailed explanation of how Fibre Channel and Ethernet can converge.

Up until now you (corporate IT) have not had to worry about video surveillance. That job was up to the security guys, those guys that wore uniforms and pretty much kept to themselves. But be prepared. If you are not already deeply involved in video surveillance equipment RFP creation, acquisition, installation and management, you will be very soon.

The world of video surveillance is changing so rapidly that the user and the traditional supplier are both in a state of frenzy. It is within this transformation that the role of IT is becoming increasingly critical. The reasons for the increase in video surveillance are pretty easy to understand. Post 9/11, enterprises as well as governments are all adding or increasing video surveillance to the security equation. Of course, casinos and banks have always been the leading users of video surveillance, but now everyone is in the game. On a typical day, a person living in a city may be videotaped five or more places, as he drives to work (and passes through specific traffic lights), parks his car in the company parking lot, enters the building, makes a trip to the bank at lunch, grabs a couple of items at the local K-mart and heads home. There are all kinds of privacy issues that can be debated, but I am staying away from that. At least for now. Right now, I am more interested in the technology and IT’s increasing role in video surveillance.

Traditional video surveillance equipment was not designed to deal with this onslaught and is gasping for air. It is being replaced almost completely with IP-based equipment.  That’s where you come in. Until now, most video surveillance equipment was based on CCTV (closed circuit TV), which basically meant the cameras, which recorded analog video, were hooked up via coaxial cable to the central point, where the video was taped on VCRs. Later, DVRs converted the analog signal to digital at the central location before storing it. But, these technologies cannot deal with the onslaught of data from more and more cameras and the fact that cameras are increasingly adding higher resolutions.

The latest crop of cameras records video in a digital format, and compresses it using MJPEG or MPEG before transmitting it over standard IP network to a central location that stores the data on scalable disk arrays. Once in the realm of IP, all the goodies we are used to in IT become available to an industry that still thinks of guards manning physical structures. Centralized management become feasible, data can be accessed asymmetrically, from multiple locations, replicated when appropriate. Another level of sophistication is being added at the end points. Now cameras can be activated when they detect motion or switch into a higher resolution if certain criteria are met. Video analytics allow software to recognize facial characteristics. Searches can be conducted for specific objects or people. You get the idea. It is like James Bond gadgetry becoming available to regular folks. But, that is reflective of the world we live in.

I think you (IT) need to be prepared to play a major role in this transformation that is occurring. You are the resident experts in storage and, at this point, pretty well up on IP technologies as well. Video surveillance simply becomes another application you have to support. So, if you are not already deeply involved in the selection and day to day management of the video surveillance equipment, it is only a matter of time. Security people who used to make decisions on such purchases without any consultation, will now insist on your involvement. You should gladly offer to help.

Another important thing to realize is that the type of storage you end up selecting for these applications will very likely be different than storage for other applications. For video surveillance the attributes that matter for storage include cost effectiveness (dirt cheap), highly scalable across both capacity and performance (cannot afford to create islands of storage), low entry price point, cost effective availability (mirroring may be too expensive), protection from disk drive or nodal failure and, most importantly, it needs to IP-based. Everything else in this environment is IP based, so making storage IP-based makes it easier to understand and manage. FC storage would bring in a level of complexity that is unnecessary here. Also, legacy architectures that have grafted an IP (iSCSI) interface would not cut it here, because they would not meet the other requirements above. Storage players that I believe merit consideration include Pivot3, Intransa, LeftHand Networks and to a lesser degree, EqualLogic (their price point may be too high for this application). There are other inexpensive storage offerings, such as from Nexsan or Xyratex but if an architecture does not allow clustering and presentation of a single system image, as it scales, it misses a criterion that I consider absolutely necessary for this application. However, you may want them in the initial mix as you start the evaluation process. I am sure you have enough on your plate without adding yet another storage-hungry application. But the way the winds are blowing, you either pro-actively plan on this or you will get pulled in pushing and screaming.

Two of the storage industry’s most prolific (and diametrically opposed) bloggers have posted–as one would expect–lengthy and diametrically opposed blog posts about the announcement this week that storage vendors are proposing a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard (FCoE).

Chuck Hollis of EMC writes that Fibre Channel over Ethernet will rectify ongoing concerns with iSCSI related to (you guessed it) reliability and performance. (Hollis also wrote a post a while back questioning whether iSCSI is really going anywhere.)

Meanwhile, on Drunken Data, a blog belonging to DR expert and maverick analyst John Toigo a commenter dismisses FCoE as pure marketing fluff from FC vendors desperate to hang on to market share. “In my view,” the commenter writes, ”FCoE [follows] the rule, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them; if you can’t join them, confuse them.’”

You couldn’t find two more different viewpoints–neither writer even shares the same basic premise about the status of FC in the market in general. As always, reality is probably somewhere in between.

FUD reigns supreme when it comes to the various new standards being proposed for Fibre Channel these days–those not participating or opposed to the standards efforts like to paint them as last-ditch ploys by FC vendors to retain market share. Supporters of the standards, however, make compelling arguments for a future of converged networks and multiprotocol systems for all. Unfortunately, aside from one analyst (Brian Garrett of ESG, quoted in our news story on the new FC-SATA spec being touted by Emulex), all the supporters of the specs we’ve talked to so far are Fibre Channel vendors.

The bottom line: the proof is in the pudding. We’re not ready to declare the standards unadulterated marketing fluff, but we’re not seeing multi-lateral industry support for any of them, and we’re certainly not seeing any storage end-users, integrators, resellers or consultants–in other words, anyone who ever actually works with storage products–being asked for their opinion by any of the standards committees.

We received the following comment from a VAR based in Florida on our piece covering the newly proposed Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard:

The concept of FC over Ethernet has very limited value. According to this article, the FCoE consortium is targeting this at low-to-mid range servers, over 10 GbE, and as a convergence technology. While 10 GbE makes sense from the storage array to the switch, it makes little to no sense from the server to the switch for two reasons: first, low to mid range servers — where this is targeted, don’t have the I/O requirements to saturate 1 GbE much less 10 GbE, and their PCI busses would not be able to handle anywhere near 10GbE throughput (do the math), and second, the reason that FCP exists is not because of throughput, but deterministic response time, which is guaranteed by the FC protocol wheras the Ethernet protocol becomes more non-deterministic with high load. This lack of deterministic response time will not be fixed with FCoE.

For these reasons, FCoE to the server does not make sense on the low/mid (don’t need the throughput and couldn’t handle it anyway) or the high end (Ethernet lacks the predictable response time of FCP). So back to the question of FCoE over 10 GbE from the storage array to the switch — if the storage arrays were 10GbE capable, why not just use iSCSI, which is already supported and in wide use in the enterprise despite what some manufacturers’ marketing and media reports say? My personal opinion is that this is an effort on the part of manufacturers who are behind in iSCSI to change the game in an effort to compete, and provides little to no value to consumers.

We have the feeling this could develop into an interesting discussion in the industry over the next year or so as FC and iSCSI, originally at odds in the market, have increasingly been combined in tiered storage environments and multiprotocol systems. Still, combining the two protocols–especially in the same data stream–could become a thorny issue.

What do you think?