May 27, 1996 Building an extranet may require an improvement in your DARTs game Some 40,000 runners gathered last month for the 100th running of the Boston Marathon. The starting line was in Hopkinton, Mass. I wasn't there to win. I'm into half-marathons now -- I carbo-load but don't run. Hopkinton is home to a company that, like my baby, 3Com Corp., was founded in 1979 and has annual sales of more than $2 billion. The company, named for its founder's initials, is in the midst of a fourth corporate transformation. The company grew from zip to $100 million as an add-on memory supplier for minicomputers. In 1990, it got into intelligent storage subsystems for IBM System/ 390s, AS/400s, and compatibles. In 1994, it entered the "open storage" market, providing its RAID disk array to Unix and PC LAN servers. And now, with Einstein's mass-energy conversion equation as its logo, the company wants into the network file server business. And so, on your behalf, I drove out from Boston to Hopkinton to welcome EMC Corp. to the Internet. I found Einstein's picture and references to http://www.emc.com in the lobby. My idea for EMC was that its high-reliability and high-performance storage systems would be great for those of you building "extranets" -- using the Internet to reach out beyond intranet firewalls for electronic commerce with your customers. EMC's vice president of engineering, Moshe Yanai, is way ahead of me. EMC's storage systems are high-capacity, already up into the terabytes (thousands of gigabytes). Yanai said that EMC's push into networking is all about economies of scale and "storage consolidation." With a twinkle in his eye, he told me that his goal is to put all the information in the world on one EMC server. OK, now listen to this: Yanai's worry, which he explained with a graph drawn in my notebook, is whether, after the perfection of "atom-manipulation" disk technology, the demand for information storage will be able to keep up with the supply of high-capacity disks. Yes, Yanai asked me to reassure him that the Internet is going to have uses for all the storage capacity that EMC is working to make available. EMC's approach to network storage starts with the integrated cached disk arrays (ICDAs) it's been attaching to mainframes and minicomputers. ICDAs spread information redundantly over a large number of small disks, which can be replaced on-line without a hiccup, while keeping the most heavily used information cached in fast semiconductor memory. Reliable and fast, as we'd like the Internet to be someday. But, instead of mainframes or minicomputers, EMC is now attaching DARTs (data access in real time) to its ICDAs. DARTs are N+1+redundant Pentium "data movers" that carry streams of data between EMC's reliable and fast ICDAs and various networks. Ask whether EMC's DARTs use Unix, NetWare, or Windows NT, and you learn that DART is an entirely new server operating system. DART was developed from scratch to guarantee service to real-time requests interspersed with sporadic requests when transferring isochronous data in high volume. EMC plans to introduce ICDA-DART-based network storage systems that support a variety of protocols over a variety of media, for example, NFS (network file system) over Ethernet, HTTP over FDDI, and MPEG over DS3 (45Mbps). Always on the outlook for vaporware, I asked how long after the NFS/Ethernet DART would we have to wait before seeing the MPEG/DS3 DART. Yanai whisked me off to see a startling demo of HDTV. A 17-square-foot terabyte EMC Media Server had already been demonstrated for the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas. It's NFS that has yet to be shipped. Isn't that backward, MPEG before NFS? EMC found doing a media server "easy." DART is an operating system with a history, which, judging from the resumes of its authors, goes back to media servers at Digital Equipment Corp. See http://www.computer.org/pubs/multimed/atwork/1995/fall/atwork.htm. Extranets will require big servers. And as electronic commerce ramps, those servers will have to be reliable and fast. As millions of consumers get involved, video will be required. So I suggest you keep your eye on EMC and that worldwide server Yanai is building in Hopkinton. Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com Corp. in 1979. He receives E-mail at bob_metcalfe@infoworld.com via the Internet. Missed a column? Go back for more. Copyright © 1996 by InfoWorld Publishing Company