While every federal agency has a different mission, they all produce data-and lots of it. By some accounts, each year agencies and their private-sector counterparts are doubling the amount of data they store. As a result, computer storage is on the mind of every federal IT manager.
Private firms have responded with several new storage schemes and technologies. Vendors displayed the newest products and some old standbys at last week's FOSE show in Washington, the largest annual IT show for the federal market.
At the personal end of the market, Iomega Corp. displayed its Jaz and Zip lines of external disk drives. The Jaz drives feature 2 gigabytes of space-a super floppy. A few years ago most notebooks couldn't boast a hard drive of that size. The Zip disks feature 250 megabytes of storage, or an eighth of the storage capacity in a Jaz disk. Zip drives now feature Universal Serial Bus connections that make attaching the unit to a computer quicker and easier.
Iomega also displayed a Clik drive, a miniature hard drive placed inside a PC card for insertion into notebooks and possibly handheld computers. The Clik drive now holds 40 megabytes.
But most of the storage vendors at FOSE were displaying products geared toward the NAS and SAN markets. More is different about these technologies than the order of letters in their acronyms.
Network attached storage, or NAS, is a substitute for a file server. It's a computer designed specifically to store data. Servers generally have broader roles and more multipurpose processing power. Most NAS units can store files of different types, including PC formats and various Unix formats.
Maxtor Corp., a Milpitas, Calif., storage company, displayed its MaxAttach network storage units, a classic example of NAS. The units attach to the network via a standard Ethernet connection and come in 40-, 80- and 160-gigabyte flavors. A MaxAttach NAS 4000 server uses redundant array of independent disk (RAID) technology, which spreads data across multiple drives so that if any one drive fails the data is mirrored and thereby protected.
NAS units hang off a network like any server or even a PC. A SAN, or storage area network, is much different. A SAN is built on the same theory as a LAN, or local area network, that connects PCs and servers for purposes of file sharing, e-mail and Web access. A SAN is a network of storage devices linked to a LAN and takes advantage of Fibre Channel technology that is much faster than Ethernet.
SANs are the most complicated storage scheme today, and there is no universal agreement on what a SAN is. Manufacturers are using different definitions, and SANs are still evolving. But it's clear they represent a step toward offering users real time access and complete interoperability between files in a mass storage environment.
Many SAN vendors at FOSE quietly acknowledged that true SAN implementations won't be available for some time.
Xiotech Corp., an Eden Prairie, Minn., storage vendor, and Tivoli Systems Inc., an IBM Corp. subsidiary headquartered in Austin, Texas, both showed SAN products at FOSE, but from different standpoints. Xiotech showed off its Magnitude SAN, which connects via fiber eight different servers, thereby avoiding a traffic bottlenecks common when using single connections between heavily utilized servers and storage units. The Magnitude stores files in RAID arrays and manages them via software designed specifically for the unit. Maximum storage capacity is 3.2 terabytes.
While many vendors at FOSE said they could cobble together SAN solutions, Xiotech featured a scalable, ready to use product.
Tivoli showed its SANergy SAN management solution. This software will manage a SAN as part of an agency's largest data systems.
NEXT STORY: Legal Briefs: Union vs. union