* Mike reports from Storage Networking World
I spent most of last week at Storage Networking World in Orlando. Mickey didn’t bother us, Hurricane Wilma did (but only minimally, and without help from Barney and Fred), and very little that was exciting or even unexpected took place. Still, much goodness was revealed.
When it comes to interoperability, things just keep getting better. The interoperability and solutions demo featured Storage Management Initiative (SMI)-based discovery of tape (from ADIC, HP and IBM); arrays (from EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP and Sun); host bus adapters (from Emulex and QLogic); switches (from Brocade, McData and QLogic); and iSCSI devices from Adaptec and Network Appliance. This is the first time I can remember when tape and iSCSI have been entered into the mix. If any of you are wondering whether the SMI-S bandwagon continues to roll, let me assure you that it does.
Demos were available featuring solutions in configuration management; compliance and cost management; data protection; security; asset and event management; and provisioning and trending. All this is good, but incremental stuff. There were no “eureka moments” visible, but we should all be glad that the gains we did see were in evidence.
At gatherings like this, many more interesting things happen off the show floor than on, usually (at least the business-related “interesting things”) in the private technology suites. Non-disclosure agreements are always in place whenever vendors speak about “futures,” but I can tell you that I saw at least two new technologies that, if they can become standards rather than just the intellectual property of two relatively small companies, will really rock your world when it comes to the areas of storage-area network connectivity and archiving. More on that when the information becomes sharable with the general-public.
Brocade, Cisco, Computer Associates, Engenio, Fujitsu, IBM, McData, Network Appliance and Sun got together to form Aperi, a consortium that will try to develop an open-source storage management platform for managing heterogeneous storage environments. I never see much of Fujitsu, so it was nice to see the company as part of the mix.
All consortium members will contribute code, which presumably will be complementary to the discovery capability provided by SMI-S. Previous storage-industry group initiatives have focused on establishing standards but not on collaborating to develop an open-source-based platform to manage storage devices. Notable by their absence from the group – EMC, Hitachi and HP.
I also saw more evidence that grid and clustering (companies with less-grandiose world views tend to prefer using the term “clustering”) continue to be in the critical development path of several vendors, as is continuous data protection. CDP still, unfortunately, is a technology with at least as many definitions as there are vendors touting it.
Something you wouldn’t have seen if you were there, but which was much in evidence during the 30-plus private meetings I had while in Orlando: Venture capital is flowing into the storage arena more easily now than it has for quite some time. Storage is getting hot again.
But all was not sweetness, light and altruism at SNW. And I fear dark forces were at work.
Next time: a rant!
