The FibreChannel Association’s European chapter (FCAE) will be extolling the virtues of storage area networks (SANs) over its transmission technology in Hannover. A group of storage and server vendors have donated pieces of equipment for an initiative called The Interoperability Solution, running on the association’s stand. The markedly heterogeneous network will show tape libraries from ADIC and StorageTek, as well as disk subsystems from HDS, RaidTec and StorageTek, being accessed from two Sun UltraSparc 5 servers provided by Veritas and an NT workstation from HDS. ATTO, Gadzoox and StorageTek all provided hubs, and the connections are an eclectic mixture of optic fiber, SCSI and DB9. Seagate Software’s BackupExec runs on the NT server, while Veritas’ NetBackup and Cluster Server packages run on the two Solaris machines. The four applications running on this agglomeration are a network file system, a web server and databases from Sybase and Oracle.
