Storage system vendors are hoping to avoid further industry fragmentation in the emerging storage area networking market by increasing the resources they are putting into the Storage Network Industry Association. Yesterday, a large sub-section of the SNIA got together to commit to the standards effort, promising intellectual property, staff, equipment and funding, and the first deliverables by the end of the year.
The new effort, which appears to have been put together primarily by Storage Technology Inc, was also backed by most of the major hardware vendors involved in storage, including Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Computer Corp, EMC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Quantum Corp, Sequent Computer Systems Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc, as well as by network storage connectivity companies such as Brocade Communications Inc, Legato Systems Inc and Veritas Software Corp.
The SNIA, which has 77 members, has been mostly in its organizational and research stages since it was founded in November 1997. Now the major vendors say they are ready to align all the arrows. Dell’s director of storage architecture Karl Schubert claimed the industry had now hit critical mass from disks to stacks. Until there were products out there it was hard to do anything else other than point-to-point connections.
But recently, there have been signs of industry fragmentation. EMC – which still insists that time-to-market pressure is its key concern – set up its own FibreAlliance earlier this year, seemingly bypassing the SNIA in favor of a fast track standards push direct to the IETF Internet Engineering Task Force (CI No 3,589). HP, Legato and Veritas were also part of that deal. Early versions of the announcement hadn’t included EMC’s name, suggesting it was persuaded to join the initiative only at the last minute, possibly by its partner HP. EMC’s Don Swatik claimed the company had been working with the SNIA, particularly on SNMP MIB management interface base specifications. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems has been working on its own StoreX open framework, but has been working within the SNIA.
The 12 companies will submit a prioritized list of work efforts for the SNIA and have committed to provide whatever resources are required to implement them. Darren Thomas, VP of Compaq’s Multi- Vendor Storage Business Unit (where Digital Equipment Corp’s StorageWorks division ended up) said that the specific areas where resources would be increased included a common interface for networked storage devices, an SNMP for fibre channel SAN devices, a disk resource management architecture, and a host independent SAN data mover. One of the first deliverables will be a set of common definitions for SAN vendors to use.
Thomas said the establishment of SANs would lead to storage that could be used as a flexible, shared resource like general purpose networks. Administrators could allocate new storage with a few keystrokes, new storage would be added to the general pool, high-availability and backup would be transparent, even over a distance.
But efforts to interest the mainstream networking industry in storage area networks have so far come to nothing. 3Com Corp briefly committed to supporting SAN products in an alliance signed with StorageTek earlier this year, but subsequently withdrew from the market, citing the need to concentrate on its core business. Compaq’s Thomas said that although the SNIA currently has no significant representation from classic networking companies, that situation was changing. They are not on the same timeframe as we are, he said.
