April 08, 2005

SAN/NAS

SANNAS summit was held here in Montreal, yesterday at the Hilton Hotel.
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed subnetwork of shared storage devices, and A network-attached storage (NAS) device is a server that is dedicated to nothing more than file sharing. (Def. SAN/NAS).
I attended the full event and it was really interesting. Apple had a special post-event dinner-seminar. the show has been around Canada for sometime and would go to Toronto next week. if you have not registered yet, hurry. cause it seems that it is already on the waiting list. oh yeah and it's free! ;)
Apple has just jumped into this market by introducing the Xsan and completing the XServe and XServer Raid solution along with OS X Server. they have also made good relations with QLogic and some other companies so that they can cover the whole solution successfully.
Yet although Apple is new to the market, and still does not have a huge market share, but with their very attractive prices and reliable solution, they seemed to be a real trouble for all other companies. From StorageTek who was present with an army of people to smaller ones, all seemed so unhappy with existence of Apple. while big ones like IBM might not be that much frightened, but I was talking to a guy from a small company that I had never heard of, who turned to have a very good solution, when we came to competing with others, the poor guy had to admit that they don't know what to do with Apple in the market. It was interesting to see that Apple does not even claim for the mission-critical market they rather have targeted the business-critical and media sectors, where they believe is a great potential and it looks like they are right on the point. The data created in the world is exploding exponentially and there are many regulations getting enacted that requires most businesses keep their data for a very long time, and the people in storage business are expecting lot's of money!
It was also very interesting that, although everyone was angry at Apple, yet most of the booths had a big sign saying "Register and win an iPod!" :). for me the most interesting part maybe was the end, when I won an Apple T-shirt! ;)

Posted by Shauheen at 06:35 PM | Comments (2)