Storage /

Vendors form alliance to link storage-area networks

By Deni Connor
Network World, 06/11/01

NEW YORK - Unable to gain user confidence in storage-area networks on their own, six top vendors are joining to pledge product interoperability and provide coordinated support.

Brocade, Compaq, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and McData say they will work together to resolve interoperability problems so that customers don't need to go from vendor to vendor. The companies have also tested and certified two multiproduct SAN packages centered around 128-port Fibre Channel switches from Brocade and McData.

The companies, through the newly formed Supported Solutions Forum of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), are making their coordinated support available automatically to customers with existing maintenance agreements. The SNIA is drafting a code of conduct to hold vendors to their word.

"Having a standard operating procedure for all major vendors to adhere to regarding service will go a huge way to eliminating the customers' biggest complaint - finger-pointing," says Steve Duplessie, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group. "Now, if you are SNIA service-blessed, you can't point the finger; you own the whole problem."

"Any new technology that plays well with other vendors' [technologies] has a greater chance of being accepted," says Rick Nelson, senior architect at EchoStar in Littleton, Colo. "The catch is if the vendor says it works together, it better. If not, marketing hype will lead to their equipment being sent to the dock and the loss of a potential client."

The promise of SANs is that they will off-load heavy-duty storagerelated traffic from LANs and WANs by shifting the traffic to a network of shared storage devices. But they are also prone to interoperability problems in that they require communication among the assorted storage components - such as switches, adapters and arrays - that make up a SAN.

This SNIA-sponsored effort is not the first attempt by storage vendors to work together to ensure interoperability, but it may be the broadest. Individual companies such as Brocade and EMC have programs in place to ensure third-party products work with their offerings.

SNIA is making membership in the interoperability forum open to other vendors, though observers say some companies - such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun - may need to open up their product lines before they join. HP says it will join as soon as possible, while Sun has yet to decide.

SNIA: www.snia.org