SAN vendors seek IT input

By Mark Hall

Computerworld, 10/22/99

SEATTLE -- The announcement this week of the election of Larry Krantz as chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) comes as the organization veers from its vendor-only focus and reaches out to information technology managers.

SNIA, said Krantz, who will remain a senior technologist at EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Mass., "is no longer about vendors talking to vendors. We need to attract the IT community."

At the Storage Networking World conference held here this week, evidence of IT involvement was apparent in the makeup of the attendee list. Nearly 40% of the audience at the three-day event ending today were IT professionals. Previous SNIA gatherings have been attended almost exclusively by vendors "focused on technical standards," Krantz said.

This year's conference was produced by SNIAand Computerworld, with about a dozen corporate sponsors also backing the show.

IT managers' current interest in storage-area networks (SAN) is because standards have begun to solidify, said Edward Frymoyer, an analyst at emf Associates Inc., a market research firm in Half Moon Bay, Calif. "They don't want to get trapped in the old IBM model. They want SANs to be truly open."

According to Frymoyer, interest in SANs is growing, especially in "the early-adopter side of the IT mainstream."

Krantz welcomed IT participation, saying it would force SNIA "to focus on standards so they are less open to interpretation."

Interoperability, once the primary issue, showed progress at the conference, as competing vendors demonstrated how their equipment worked together on a single Fibre Channel network in a laboratory environment.

However, despite a demonstration at the conference of a multisite Common Information Model system, a proposed management standard, users remained concerned about the progress of SAN management.

Bob Adair, a vice president at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York, said, "In a network, bad things happen. In a SAN, management will be even more critical."

Vendors remain bullish about the technology and continue to push SAN-ready products into the market. Frymoyer said his company's market projections for growth of SAN-enabled equipment average 56% over the next five years, to more than $32 billion by 2003.