McData ROC’s Data Consolidation
McData ROC’s Data Consolidation
June 13th, 2006: McData is taking data consolidation to new heights with its PR friendly Remote Office Consolidation (ROC) solution. IDM spoke with John Kelley, McData President and COO about what the ROC has to offer small to medium enterprises.
By tapping its well of telecommunications experience and infrastructure and teaming up with Riverbed and its winning wide area network (WAN) products, McData has positioned itself to deliver what it believes is a superior method of consolidating and protecting distributed data.
IDM recently caught up with McData’s President and COO, John Kelley for a chat about remote office consolidation
IDM: Can you tell us a bit about the ROC?
JK: With the ROC, what we have now is a combination of technologies that allows us to have a customers enterprise move data from anywhere in the world back to a centralised site. They can do ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), they can do data storage and they can do other applications.
For itself, it doesn’t sound too sexy, but for a data centre manager or a person who’s trying to grow a business it’s a pretty important concept. Now they can take information, whether it’s in a Microsoft exchange format, an oracle format, a block file, a flat file and have it be moved with speeds and costs that allow me to control it.
IDM: What does this mean for compliance?
JK: In the US, Sarbanes Oxley would be a driver for sure. Meaning, I can be more secure in knowing that I at least have an opportunity to look at that data for compliance purposes. For a healthcare institution, this means I can move MRI data, huge files, from Perth to Sydney to a specialist where I would have had to email it or send it by Fedex. For homeland security, it means I can move big files like photographs. So it’s a game changer.
When do you do serial ATA? When do you Do ISCSI? When do you do disk array, when do you put it on tape, when do you vault it… it gives a control point. You can bring in all this information and assign it to the appropriate cost and capability of the products themselves.
IDM: So what solutions are you competing with?
JK: A series of existing things offered by a smattering of companies.
In terms of who has the ability to grab information in a fibre channel, storage or IP world, there really isn’t anyone there. The closest would probably be Cisco. They might have 60 percent of those elements. Things that would be unique to us, would be the professional services. We have a network operating centre that manages these networks from a centralised site. Cisco has never invested in that, probably won’t either. Cisco is also “use my stuff, that’s it”. They used to be best of breed, and they’ve transitioned it from one end to the other so you have to use Cisco for the most part for their stuff to really work correctly. We don’t do that. So if a customer chooses Extreme or Foundry or Cisco itself, we don’t care. We connect with all of those quite readily.
IDM: So the ROC is partially a Wide Area File Services (WAFS) solution?
JK: WAFS are one portion of the ROC. If you’re Brocade, you put WAFS out here, it simply provides an end point. You’re going to have to figure out how to monitor and manage it.
We provide other components that neither Cisco nor Brocade can. In the US, neither Cisco or Brocade have the ability to do the Telco side for example. Our professional consulting group is worldwide and has been doing for some period of time. They understand IP, telephony and SANS, so we have a unique asset in the regards.
The channel extension piece, neither Brocade or Cisco have. So if you’re in the mainframe side, there’s no product. So if a customer want’s to move it by WAFS, by channel extension, no can do. If they want to move it by IFCP neither of them can do. FCIP they could do, so for the customer to pick how they want to move it, Cisco and Brocade can only go with two of these options.
IDM: So what benefits does the ROC offer in regards to consolidation times and disaster recovery?
JK: To give you an idea, internally, we moved a 16Mb Microsoft access file from London to Colorado, and it was taking us four to five minutes. We’re down to four to five seconds. The financial people said “wow, we can save on telephony costs. We won’t have to buy more pipes, more bandwidth or we’ll be able to utilise our pipes better”.
Our IT person Jim Gromen on the other hand said “no, this is going to change how we look at disaster recovery.” If you take time and latency out of the equation by large with block and file transfer, we can re-architect how we’re doing disaster recovery and backup.
This changes how we’re going to look at data storage and business continuance. It’s been one of the “ah ha’s!” for me, and we’ve spent the last few days talking about that element because it works for us. Because we’re global there’s a lot of applicability with other companies.
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