Connective Power

While many of the major storage manufacturers – Avid, Globalstor, Sonnet Tech, etc. – are gearing their product offerings toward Ethernet (and beyond), a few others are staying true to Fibre – Archion for instance. Others still, like JMR, are trailblazing with proprietary technology like PCIe. Ultimately, your networking needs are determined by your bandwidth and your budget.

Fine Tuning Fibre

On one side of the rink, we have Fibre Channel, a technology originally from the field of supercomputing that has become the standard connection type for storage area networks (SAN). Archion stands by Fibre as still the best way to capitalize on bandwidth. “The thing about being GigE [Gigabit Ethernet] is that anything high-bandwidth, you just can’t go there,” Jim Tucci, Archion’s CTO, explains. “You’re not getting SAS speeds. You’re only getting 100 Mbps and that’s it. If you’re trying to do 20 systems all running 220 DNS HD, you’re not gonna get there. You need to have Fibre. We have 8 Gigabit Fibre coming soon.” Archion’s latest Synergy HDu product integrates into the Avid Unity Media player with a Fibre Channel interface. The company’s stand-alone Node also relies on Fibre. Expect to see a push for 8 Gbps Fibre Channel at NAB 2009 from Archion and QLogic.

Efficiency at a Low Price?

Steve Modica, the CTO of Small Tree Communications, believes, however, that Ethernet still reigns supreme. “I had a good friend at Microsoft and he said there’s Ethernet and Ether not, and Ethernet always wins.” As a provider of cost-effective Mac solutions, Small Tree naturally turned to Ethernet. A large part of the Small Tree Web site is dedicated to encouraging the Fibre-to-Ethernet conversion (see the “Extreme Mac-Over Contest” video). The next natural step from there is higher Gigabit Ethernet.

“Ten Gig is obviously more expensive than Ethernet. I would guess that 25 percent of our business is 10 Gig. And it’s mostly focused on people putting 10 Gig into a server, for the purposes of serving data to lots of Gigabit clients.”

Andy Liebman, who founded EditShare on the idea of centralized storage, is another fan of Ethernet. He points to the efficiency of the technology. “The fundamental fact is, whether you have Fibre Channel or Ethernet, data travels from point A to point B at the speed of light. So, if what you need is to look at a data stream that’s 20 Mbps, it’s not going to be any faster through Fibre Channel. The same applies to 40 Mbps and 60 Mbps. Once you get to 60 Mbps, you’re talking about meeting the needs of most of the people who are out there editing: two or three streams of ProRes or DNX HD or many streams of DV50 or DV60. When you get to uncompressed HD, that’s a different thing, and that’s where we have 10 GB Ethernet.”

A Few Reservations

Globalstor has built a business on predicting the next hot file format. Taking a lead on specifically designing its REDe line of storage products for the RED One camera, Globalstor has lately made efforts to boost processing power. Scott Leif, CEO and founder of Globalstor, says his company is responding to the need for increased processing power, while still being able to accomodate a large mass of files. “It’s a gray area. Our systems typically incorporate some form of storage whether it’s RAID or whether it’s just individual drives. For the RED content, throughput is not a big issue. You don’t need a lot of disc performance if content is compressed. Ethernet in most cases is plenty fast with Gigabit Ethernet to stream the RED content over a network.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. “The Ethernet doesn’t play very friendly with uncompressed content. You really can’t stream uncompressed 2K over Ethernet and do it in real-time. With FC SAN you can, but with that comes a lot of cost. What I’m seeing in this marketplace is that people are running around with thin budgets and there’s not a lot of money floating around.”

However, Leif sees an efficient way to amp speed by creating a centralized Ethernet backbone. “If you have multiple ports, you trunk them together. Realistically, 10 Gig is not going to yield 10 Gig of sequential transfer rates – it will be more like 8 Gig. But if you have multiple pipes and you trunk them together, you can in theory get 20 Gig.”

10 Gig and Beyond

EditShare’s Andy Liebman believes 10 GigE is already here and that 40 GigE and 60 GigE are not far behind. “The advantage of Ethernet is, because it’s on every laptop and workstation, it makes it easy to bring others to the party,” he says. “People with Fibre Channel have to think twice about every workstation they add to the system because of the infrastructure costs. The new 4 Gigabit or 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel systems are powerful, but you can pump more data over 10 Gigabit Ethernet than 8 Gbps Fibre Channel, and we’re going to have 20 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet soon.”

Meanwhile, forces are working on a larger scale to Ethernet’s benefit. According to a recent article in Network World, “the worldwide recession works to 40 Gigabit’s advantage, in a way. While the market will contract this year, in a longer-term sense, there will be an opportunity for technologies that will help service providers reduce their capital expense while still expanding their network capacity.” Over time, the piece continues, “the price per bit of a 40 Gbps wavelength will drop lower than that of a 10 Gbps wavelength in a DWDM long-haul system, making 40 Gbps a very attractive next step.”

Shipments of equipment that supports 100 Gbps wavelengths are expected in late 2011.

Steve Katz, vice president of OEM sales & marketing at JMR Electronics, develops a system based on PCI Exress attached storage.

“It’s lighter bandwidth and higher speed than Fibre Channel and uses one less bus bridge device. Every time you convert one thing to another thing, every stage has a certain amount of latency. And, of course, every bridge has a certain amount of cost. So by connecting directly to the PCI bus in the computer, we’ve eliminated the cost of a Fibre Channel bridge and also whatever overhead and latency that Fibre Channel bridge creates.”

The bottom line, he says, is a reduced investment overall. “SATA offers great performance at greatly reduced cost and the cost per Gigabit is very low. So, even people using Fibre Channel infrastructure to connect their systems are now using SATA disk drives.”