Why should you be interested to know that today the SBB (Storage Bridge Bay) Working Group has quietly published version 1.0 of its specs?
I'll give you two reasons: reduced cost and improved flexibility of storage enclosures.
As you may remember, we first heard about SBB last Spring when founding members Dell, EMC, Intel and LSI announced their plans to create a set of commons specs to simplify the manufacturing of entry level and mid tier storage devices.
About six months later SBB counts more than 30 members, sorry, too many to list them all, while IBM, NetApp and Xyratex have also joined the Board. Why so much interest surrounding SBB?
Because, as many analysts indicate, SMBs is a yet unexploited market segment and bears the promise of increasing revenues for years to come.
However, competition in that space will be more focused on price/ performance ratio than on offering unique, hard to mimic features as it happens instead for the top tier.
Obviously, cutting production cost by adopting standard components as the SBB charter suggests, means being better aligned with other vendors' price list, hence more competitive or not less competitive.
Another interesting aspect of that market is that SMB customers are more inclined to choose from a variety of technologies, rather than pick from just a few as larger customers do. Therefore, storage devices with a modular structure, where for example it's easy to add a RAID controller or a power supply canister respond better to those requirements.
The first version of the SBB specs addresses topics such as the physical dimension of a controller board, and form factor and electrical characteristics to connect a controller to the enclosure backplane.
Boring topics? Perhaps, but you will probably change your mind if SBB specs bestow the ability of custom-configuring your storage enclosures with a variety of options.
Now that the specs are out other products and other vendors will follow, but for examples of SBB 1.0 compliant devices look at the Dell PowerVault MD1000 or at the IBM System Storage EXP3000 .
This first version of the specs is just a beginning, because SBB members have already begun working on a second version expected to complete next year, that will incorporate some recent technological innovations such as 6Gbps SAS, 4Gbps FC and 5Gbps PCIe components.
Perhaps the most convincing proof of the importance of SBB is that member vendors with licensed technologies are granting other vendors no fee licensing to develop compliant products if the other party returns a similar favor with its own licenses. How is this for collaboration?
Posted by Mario Apicella on September 25, 2006 10:36 AM
