McData details its intelligent switch

After widespread industry speculation, McData on Wednesday unveiled its plans for a next-generation Fiber Channel (FC) switch. Unlike its primary competitor Brocade Communications Systems, McData is not requiring its customers to purchase an entirely new switch platform — something McData’s CEO says customers are unequivocally and uniformly opposed to doing.

The plans for adding new switching capabilities to its existing line of director and switch products were revealed earlier this week to InfoWorld and a handful of technology editors from Europe. At the event, held at McData’s Broomfield, Colo.-based headquarters, McData outlined its approach to intelligent switching and demonstrated the product for the first time.

McData expects to compete with San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade and Cisco Systems, and with a number of startups that are working to develop switches that can inspect and then route storage I/0 requests to specific storage arrays, regardless of type or manufacturer.

McData’s intelligent switch platform will initially feature a modified version of the company’s Sphereon 4500 switch and a blade that will fit into McData’s existing Intrepid 6140 director. The new switch product will be available first and will feature a storage processor developed by a third-party vendor that works in concert with McData’s custom-built 24-port Fiber Channel switch-on-a-chip ASIC, which already resides in the Sphereon 4500. Shortly after, McData will release a blade that features the same new technology and plugs directly into the company’s existing line of high-port-count Intrepid director products. Both products will be available next year.

Chris Ilg, senior manager of McData’s strategic marketing group, said the forthcoming switch will be able to virtualize any storage array, appliance, or element regardless of the vendor. This means all the physical storage connected to the intelligent switch will be presented to the storage administrator at the storage management software level as a virtual single pool of storage.

“Virtualization has long been a disk-array technology,” said Ilg. “But the array vendors are only able to do it within their own equipment or even only within a single box.

“We’ve moved it into the fabric and will allow support for heterogeneous storage elements,” Ilg added.

Ilg explained that the architecture of the intelligent switching blade and switch will rely on third-party software developers and storage array OEMs to port their respective storage management applications over to the new platform. Thus far only Waltham, Mass.-based startup Incipient has ported its software to the new switch; it was Incipient’s software that was used in the demo of the forthcoming switch.

The demonstration, held in McData’s lab, showed data being migrated from one array to another, then the same data being snapshot copied and migrated back to the original array but on a different disk. Ilg classified the demo as a disaster-recovery solution and said the entire process was not disruptive to the running application.

The modified 24-port Sphereon 4500, will include the licensed processor on a virtualization card and will be sold as a 16-port switch; the other eight 2Gbps ports will be used to connect the new virtualization processor to the existing 24-port FC switch-on-a-chip dubbed Poseidon. Each port will be able to handle 20 to 40 paths, depending on application or number of applications being ran through a single port.

McData’s architecture also employs the use of a separate server to house the individual third-party storage applications designed to operate on the switch. Ilg explained McData’s approach using the terms “fast path” and “control path.” He said the processor (likely a general-purpose chip) for the control path will reside outside of the switch in an appliance-like device and will load mapping tables onto the programmable processor (the fast path), which is responsible for switching the I/0 requests through the appropriate port. In doing so, the control path processor also tells the fast path processor what type and amount of physical storage it requires. Once the storage processor receives the request, it routes it in less than 10 microseconds.

McData contends that its approach is much different than Brocade’s, whose Silkworm Fabric Application Platform (FAP) is made up of technology developed by Rhapsody Networks, a company Brocade acquired in January. Revealed at its media day in February, Brocade demonstrated the Rhapsody platform running third-party applications and showed off the switch.

Unlike McData’s switch, the Silkworm FAP has a control path-like processor placed in the box along with fast-path-like processors at every port. Brocade said its first switch, which will be ready later this year, will also have 16 ports. However, unlike McData, Brocade can’t leverage the existing technology within its Silkworm switch, as the new intelligent switch was developed by Rhapsody. McData believes this will not please Brocade’s customers.

“Brocade’s concept is no good as it relates to what end-users want,” said John Kelley, president and CEO of McData. “Our solution is cost-effective, as it uses the same processing engine [that is found in McData’s FC switches today] and the same optics, power supplies, and fan.”

Kelley went on to say that datacenter administrators don’t want to replace FC gear that runs fine today, and are asking vendors to help them optimize what they have without adding people or cost. Kelley also said each customer defines intelligence quite differently, and that McData’s solution gives customer a chance to pick and choose the intelligence they need and when they need it.

“We want to say, ‘Here is a platform, you decide your intelligence needs,'” said Kelley. “We’ve made a product that will scale and grow as their needs change.

“We don’t define intelligence, we enable it,” he added.

Kelley said Brocade’s decision to put a control-path-like processor in the box and specialized ASICs at every port will make the box expensive. He believes that since the technology for the platform was developed by Rhapsody, it will mean Brocade’s new switch will not be of the same ilk as its existing line of Silkworm switches; no common components will be reused, therefore customers will have to tear out old gear to get the new technology.

He also alluded to the fact that Brocade won’t achieve manufacturing efficiencies, as it is an entirely new box. Additionally, he said McData’s approach allows customers to choose which ports will be made intelligent and which will remain standard FC ports.

“Our view is speed to market, simplicity, and ease,” said Kelley. “When customers see what we have they say, ‘You got it!'”

Brocade does have plans to offer its customers an upgrade path, said Brian Byum, a director of product management at Brocade. However, it is uncertain when that will happen.

“We stated at our user conference that the same application platform is going to be incorporated as an upgradeable option [a blade] in our modular platform,” said Byum, speaking of the company’s 128-port Silkworm 1200 director product. “We haven’t publicly disclosed [a date for when that will happen].”

Byum also remarked that a single-processor approach, such as the one McData is employing, may create performance bottleneck and that a distributed approach of processing such as Brocade’s provides scale.

McData’s Ilg said that two to three years ago when Brocade first started looking at intelligent switching that was likely the case. However, now the processors available are much more powerful, he said. That it is likely the reason Brocade is using processors at each port, because those processors created by Rhapsody two years ago are not powerful enough to act as a centralized processor today, he added. He added that placing 16 processors in a switch will also make the product three times more expensive per port.

Brocade declined to explain its pricing strategy for its forthcoming switch.

Meanwhile, McData’s other big competitor, Cisco Systems, has also been mum on the details of its solution. However, Ed Chapman, senior director of product management for the Storage Technology Group, said Cisco will announce its solution along with a list of software partners by year’s end. Chapman said the only new thing in Cisco’s solution will be the line cards that plug into its existing MDS 9509 Multilayer Director Switch and the MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch, which are based on technology obtained in the August 2002 acquisition of startup Andiamo Systems. Those line cards are in beta testing today, said Chapman.

To date, Cisco has announced that Veritas, EMC, and HP have made commitments to porting their software to their new platform. Those companies have also announced plans to port over to Brocade’s platform. McData declined to discuss who it is in talks with to port to its intelligent switching platform.

Despite the buzz surrounding the intelligent switching space, all companies are quick to say these switches won’t change the world over night. They all agree the adoption will be driven by customer demand, and customer demand will arrive as applications are actually ported over to the intelligent switches.

To make that easier, Cisco, Brocade, and McData are working with the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Technical Committee T11 to create a standard way for ISVs and storage OEMS to write software for these switches. Through Task Group T11.5, the companies will work to develop an API standard that permits software to be written once and work across any intelligent switch. All three have proposed drafts of a standard and believe a Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) will be complete by the middle of 2004.