By Jo Maitland
The war over storage area network standards intensified yesterday when more than half of the fibre switch folk in the EMC Software- driven Fiber Alliance defected from the group, fed-up with its slow pace on standardization. The five switch companies – Ancor Communications Inc, Brocade Communications systems Inc, Gadzoox Networks Inc, McData Corporation and Vixel Corporation – have formed an independent group charged with forging common standards for interoperability between their products and third party equipment; an issue analysts have said is holding back the development of storage area networks (SANs).
The Open Standards Fabric Initiative (OSFI) will focus on developing interoperability between switches based on three fibre channel switch protocols FC-SW, FC-SW2 and FC-GS (fibre channel general services), already being used in the market. The OSFI intends to fill in the gaps in these protocols by the end of the year and then submit its framework to the ANSI and IETF for overall ratification. According to a spokesperson at Ancor, each vendor within the Fibre Alliance was using its own interpretation of this protocol. The standards are good on other components within the SAN market, such as host bus adapters, but it’s not at the same level in the switch market.
The Fibre Alliance, set up by EMC Software in February, is attempting to create a framework that manages all the native software on each component within the SAN. Switch interoperability normally gets addressed for one hour a month, said one member of the OSFI. This is not enough. We will meet once a week until this is done. Despite the OSFI stating it was acting as a sub-group within the Fibre Alliance, a spokesperson for EMC said: We applaud any efforts to standardize but we will be examining closely what they are doing to see if it will conflict with what we are doing. One analyst on the call said that working on device level interoperability is fine but without an overall framework for managing those devices, the storage area network is still way off. A spokesperson for McData, a member of OSFI said, We have to crawl before we can walk.
Also involved in trying to initiate standards for managing the various components of a SAN is the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) with over a hundred members. SNIA chairman, Roger Reich, director of Compaq’s network storage division said of the new group: I don’t know where they are going or what they are doing, but if they need backing in the form of money or talent we would be happy to speak to them. He added that the Fibre Alliance was a closed, profit-making group with a different agenda to the SNIA. In response to Reich, Greg Reyes, CEO of Brocade and a member of the OSFI said: We are not interested in his offer.
