Scalable Sharing of Wide Area Storage Resources

Over the past two years a combination of circumstances has fueled intense efforts to rethink the integration of IP networking and mass storage. Chief among these facts are the universal acceptance of Internet technologies for network infrastructure, the relentless acceleration of the Ethernet substrate, and the ongoing, exponential rise in the amount of data that must be moved and managed. Taken together they present the network storage community with a compelling opportunity to address its traditional goals while scaling up the size and geographical reach of its systems and scaling down their complexity and total cost of ownership. But although a new synthesis of Internet and storage technologies seems inevitable under these conditions, what is less evident is that this potential new synthesis may take one or both of two distinctly different forms.