SAN to SCSI converter targets AS/400

Crossroads flips storage routing on its head to give legacy servers a longer life

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Storage routers which were developed to re-use old SCSI devices within SANs are being flipped around to allow otherwise incompatible legacy systems such as IBM's AS/400 to join SAN-based storage consolidation projects.

Crossroads Systems (www.crossroads.com) says that its ServerAttach box connects to legacy servers via SCSI on one side, and to Fibre Channel on the other. It can then be configured via a Web browser to make a Fibre Channel disk array look like a SCSI hard disk, say.

Bob Griswold, Crossroads' chief technologist, says that the technology was originally invented to connect devices such as SCSI tape libraries to Fibre Channel.

"We realised that doing the reverse was also attractive, especially for the orphan server market," he says. "Lots of companies have older AS/400, RS/6000 and HP 9000 servers running mature but critical applications, and no easy way to bring those into the SAN. We can extend the working life of those servers."

He adds that while the application could be moved to a new server instead, the ServerAttach route should be both simpler and cheaper, at around $7000 to $8000 per SCSI port.

Crossroads will offer two ServerAttach versions: the SA20 with two SCSI ports and one Fibre Channel, and the SA40 with four SCSI and two Fibre Channel ports.

Griswold admits though that this method has its limitations. For example, some applications may not be able to cope with a shared SAN resource such as a tape library.