An old idea to get your brain around

I was swapping email with a pretty bright colleague of mine the other day, telling him about Fabric Applications, and he responded that he 'couldn't get his brain around it'. I assumed it was understandable given that Fabric apps are a fairly new idea to many. But just how new are Fabric apps? Not very - especially in IT-years.

With a little googling you can turn up a number of stories about the Brocade Fabric Application Platform, as well as Gartner's write-up announcing the company's entry into the market via the Rhapsody acqusition.

This was on November 8, 2002.

So turns out, Fabric Apps go back further than Camera phones and even VoIP.

The primary appeal of Fabric apps in 2002 was the same as it is today, to quote from a story at the time, "...to run [applications] in the SAN without the need for a seperate server."

For more info on this time-tested approach to enterprise-class data management that lowers administrative cost of ownership, visit the Brocade Fabric applications page.

Why Fabric Apps?

You may wonder, "Why Fabric Applications?" We already have servers, appliances and even storage arrays that can be used to run applications -- why another platform?

As it turns out, there's a huge demand for better, more intelligent management of organizations' data: whether to more optimally store it, more dynamically redeploy it, do more with it, better secure it, lower the cost per gigabyte or the required energy to support it. Running these data management applications 'on the fabric' turns out to be more effective, efficient and cheaper. Specifically:

• Broad OS Support -- Storage fabrics aren't tied to server operating systems, so they can easily work across heterogeneous server environments.
• Heterogeneous Storage Support -- Similarly, fabric apps work across vendors' arrays. This comes in very handy for lease expirations or any time you need to move between different vendors' storage equipment.
• Eliminating Host Footprint -- Fabric apps don't require server agents - this is a huge area of savings for large enterprises who would otherwise have to touch hundreds or thousands of servers, not just for the deployment, but every patch, upgrade, etc.
• Leverage for your SAN Infrastructure -- most companies have a SAN, and this is a way to leverage your current investment rather than deploy additional servers or appliances to support a new application. You also leverage your existing staff's expertise in SAN administration.
• Enterprise Scalability -- Fabric apps are designed to scale with the SAN - to thousands of hosts and Storage Arrays.
• Highest Performance -- Fabric apps run on purpose-built hardware rather than generic x86 boxes. This means that applications execute at wire-speed, on devices capable of millions of IOPS.
• Enterprise Reliability -- Fabric apps are using the same trusted data backbone that deliver 99.999% reliability in the data-path day in and day out.
  

Today there are a growing number of applications finding their way onto storage fabrics. An upcoming topic will be about some of these types of Fabric apps.

Fabric Applications - Welcome to the Fabric

Welcome to the inagural post of the Fabric Applications blog. What are Fabric Applications? The term encompasses data management programs that run within a SAN. It's derived from the Fabric Application Interface Standard or FAIS, which is a common API framework for implementing storage applications in a storage networking environment. More info can be found on the FAIS project site.

This blog is intended to become a mecca for all things Fabric Apps -- I hope you'll come here to read, contribute and help grow the shared knowledge of this new and valuable technology.