IBM updates SAN File System software

See correction below

SAN FRANCISCO – IBM Corp. next month will release a new version of its TotalStorage SAN (storage area network) File System Software designed to work with a wider variety of new server and storage environments.

Unlike previous versions of the SAN File System, which supported only IBM products, Version 2.1 will work with storage devices from IBM rivals including EMC Corp. Hewlett-Packard Co., and Hitachi Data Systems Corp. It will also now support the Red Hat Inc. Linux Enterprise Server 3.0 and Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris 9 operating systems.

The software, which will begin shipping on June 29, has also been enhanced to allow customers to move data from one device to another without disrupting their server operating systems, said Jeff Barnett, [cq] the manager of IBM’s storage software strategy. “The environment itself is designed so that it isolates your server environment from your storage environment,” he said.

Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab spent more than six years working on the SAN File System before it was first released in the fall of 2003, IBM said.

SAN file systems are useful for companies looking to provide a number of different servers with identical views of data on the network, said Arun Taneja, founder of storage industry research firm Taneja Group. “This kind of stuff comes into play where there are large amounts of data, you have heterogeneous server environments, and you have the need for several servers to work with each other on a particular application,” he said.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center has been working since mid-January on implementing the SAN File System on 520T bytes of storage it is using for a variety of high-performance computing tasks. The center decided to use IBM’s software because of it could be used by a large number of systems and with a large amount of storage, said Leslie Southern, the director for high-performance computing at the center. 

Though the center is using the SAN File System exclusively on IBM FAStT900 and FAStT600 storage servers right now, version 2.1 might change that, she said. “We have a heterogeneous environment as far as computing goes,” she said. “It gives us more flexibility in choosing the appropriate equipment.”

Version 2.1 of the SAN File System will be available stand-alone, or as a free upgrade to existing customers on June 29. Pricing for the software will remain unchanged, IBM said. There will be a US$10,000 per processor licensing fee for the File System’s Metadata Server, and customers will pay a $5,000 per processor usage charge for application servers that use the file system.

Correction: In this article, the origin of IBM Corp.’s SAN File System was originally incorrect.