Aloha Aarohi

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Aarohi Communications Inc. of San Jose, California, is best known as the manufacturer of components for intelligent SANs for the likes of McData and EMC. So why is the company beating the drum for information lifecycle management (ILM)? Amar Kapadia, Director of Product Management at Aarohi, explains it in simple terms. The ever-growing demand for storage is driving greater storage capacity requirements and price improvements. Data must be classified, accessed, and moved in a manner non-disruptive to the end-user.

"ILM offers a set of storage aware products and services that allow users to apply values and rules to data," says Kapadia. "Data is classified at its source as to its information value and stored (or discarded) on a device matching its asset value."

ILM facilitates this process by automatically protecting information based on recovery objectives and driven by information value. Thus an ILM implementation causes an alignment of an enterprise's information assets with business objectives. But that will only be possible if the vendor community creates a solid foundation of virtualized storage applications based upon an intelligent storage infrastructure. And that's where Aarohi comes in.

The initial batch of storage virtualization products relied on discrete solutions based on off-the-shelf components or port-based processing engines. These provided the functionality needed, but created performance bottlenecks and were costly to implement. The appliance approach to virtualization, on the other hand, is easy to deploy but tends to be application-specific and does not meet enterprise-class requirements. As a result, believes Kapadia, end-users have been slow to adopt intelligent solutions.

"Centric to ILM solutions will be awareness of the underlying storage infrastructure and the ability to manipulate data throughout this infrastructure," he says. "Intelligent storage networking will be a major facilitator in management and movement of data within tomorrow's SAN."

Aarohi Intelligence

According to Aarohi, the next generation of storage virtualization will be based on a new class of intelligent SAN components that eliminate the problems of first generation solutions. Aarohi's AV150 Intelligent Storage Processor, for example, is a fully integrated Fibre Channel switch ASIC designed to eliminate the latency and scalability issues inherent in earlier intelligent storage networking devices. This storage processor accelerates performance based on a split-path architecture.

The AV150 will be featured in McDATA's Virtualization Services Module, a high-performance enterprise platform for the EMC Invista network storage virtualization solution.

"We chose Aarohi's AV150 Intelligent Storage Processor as the enabling technology for our Virtualization Services Module because of its unique data streaming architecture that delivers, as demonstrated, sustained wire-speed processing performance, with very low I/O latency," said Wayne Morris, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, McDATA. "With this level of I/O speed and bandwidth, McDATA is driving EMC Invista at 1 million input/output per second (IOPs) and will create the industry's first platform to meet the demanding requirements of virtualization at the enterprise level."

Kapadia says that the AV150 Intelligent Storage Processor is optimized specifically for storage applications, and that the company is leveraging it in a couple of directions.

"Due to market demand for a PCI form factor board, Aarohi has created an Intelligent Storage Adapter that provides a mechanism for in-band appliance vendors to provide hardware acceleration for their applications," he says. "The AV150 Intelligent Storage Processor roadmap will build on the existing architectural innovations such as streaming low-latency data-flow, storage centric enhancements, and the application processing engine to meet the demands of next generation storage devices that require cost reduction, 4G speeds, and support for IP storage protocols."

Another product said to facilitate ILM is Aarohi FabricStream software. When coupled with the company's SAN components, it provides intelligence across the storage network. It improves the performance of fabric-based switches and directors, as well as storage appliances.

"FabricStream has received strong validation from software application providers who are currently developing with the software to address critical storage requirements including volume management, data migration and data replication," says Kapadia. "Through FabricStream, platform vendors not only accelerate the design process, but also gain system time-to-market advantages."

Its software stack is comprised of three services modules. These offer:

a) Advanced SAN Services
b) Virtualization
c) Basic Copy Services and Advanced Copy Services.

FabricStream also includes Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a Solution Development Kit (SDK) that partners use to develop complementary storage applications and platform solutions. Kapadia says it is currently being enhanced to support virtual tape libraries and secondary write appliances to enable continuous data protection and journaling applications.

To drive forward its ILM / intelligent storage ambitions, Aarohi is a contributing member of the T11.5 Working Group that is defining the Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS). The first draft of the specification is expected to be released during the second half of 2005.