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April 07, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Storage industry doing its part

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If you read our book or work in IT, you know that computing architectures are evolving. And I'm here to tell you that the storage industry is doing its part in mak-ing the datacenter adaptable and extensible.

Here at SNW in the valley of the sun, and the place I once called home, I'm seeing first hand the phenomenal maturation of storage networking equipment.

My colleague Mario agrees. Every vendor we talk to is designing products for customer needs. Additionally, they are taking the onus upon themselves to achieve interoperability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Every industry does that. Right? Wrong! Not this industry.

Back in September 2001, while at Red Herring magazine, which is rumored to be re-launching in print later this year, I wrote about how the storage titans would rather fight then interoperate. I was right back then, but ever since then they've changed their tune. No. I'm not taking any credit at all for that shift. Instead I'd like to give Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) props for their work here. Yes 'props' is slang and is short for 'proper respect.' And no, I'm not giving them credit just because I'm at their show, eating their food and using their wireless LAN. Rather I'm giving them credit because they've played an important role in bringing warring warlords together.

Each show, which is twice a year, SNIA demonstrates (literally) the progress they've made in creating a standard way to manage formerly interoperable systems. On Monday, SNIA announced that 14 vendors have had products certified to be compliant with Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), the proposed standard that permits third-party software products perform simple management of multi-vendor arrays- something that was impossible when I wrote that Red Herring article.

I'm done with the praise part of this entry, because in my opinion there is little more SNIA can do to make this 3-year-in-the-making interoperability stick.

I talked to Brian Truskowski, general manager of IBM's TotalStorage Open Soft-ware group, yesterday about interoperability and he was pleased with the progress of SNIA and shot down any implication that the acceptance of this whole thing is taking entirely too long.

I disagree. And again it isn't SNIA's fault. Vendors are involved with SNIA, but they aren't working too hard in submitting proposals for additional functionality. As it stands today, SMI-S is good, but it isn't great.

I'll stop that rant and go back to back-slapping.

The vendors are hearing customers on the cost and flexibility front. As I said earlier, each one I talk to has products out, in progress or planned that are lower in cost and can be modified up or down depending on the customer's need. For example, IBM and HP both made announcement this week about products that address those concerns.

Hmmmmm. Now I'm thinking that maybe all the vendor focus on bringing the cost of adoption down and presenting more options is yet another way to detract users' attention from the still lacking interoperability. Hell, there is always Fall SNW to prove me wrong.

Posted by Scott Tyler Shafer on April 7, 2004 11:37 AM

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