HP Flips on Interop Switch

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) this week is announcing that it will formally support mixed-vendor Fibre Channel fabrics.

Initially, HP will support interoperability between Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) equipment. The company expects to add Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) into the mix by January. HP resells Fibre Channel switches from all three.

"What we're promoting is standards-based interoperability. We will not support reverse-engineered interoperability," says Edgardo Lopez, product marketing manager for SAN integration at HP.

But for that reason, any proprietary features -- such as Brocade's Secure OS or Cisco's Virtual SANs -- will not work between different vendors' switches in HP's certified configurations. Switches must be set into "interop mode," communicating with each other via FC-SW-2, the industry standard for Fibre Channel.

"Interoperability continues to be more of a journey than a destination," says Lopez.EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), however, is wondering what took HP so long to figure out how to support multivendor SANs. "We've supported mixed-vendor environments since 2001," says spokesman Rob Callery. EMC, like HP, supports Brocade and McData devices in the same SAN fabric.

Fibre Channel protocols have nominally been standardized for nearly a decade, but the industry has been plagued by serious interoperability problems. Brocade, in particular, has been viewed as designing its switches to not play well with others in an attempt to protect its market share. Recently, though, there have been signs that Brocade realizes it will need to change its stance on this issue if it wants to survive over the long run (see Has Brocade Seen Interop Light?).

Lopez says customers that are asking HP for multivendor SAN fabrics fall into two buckets [ed. note: ouch!]. One group needs to consolidate two or more SAN "islands" built with equipment from different vendors; the other group wants to avoid being locked in to a single switch provider.

Earlier this year, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) staged an interoperability demo with switches from Brocade, McData, Cisco, CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT), and QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC) connected in one SAN fabric. HP says its announced support for mixed Brocade/McData environments followed from the SNIA work (see Users Cheer Interop Demos).

It's worth remembering that Brocade declined to actively participate in the SNIA interop demo in April. At the time, a company spokeswoman said: "We are not seeing that much demand for multivendor fabrics among customers today." Presumably, HP has since made it clear to Brocade that there is demand for interoperable SAN switches (see Brocade Snubs Multivendor Demo.)Also this week, HP is expecting to announce that its CommandView EVA 3.0a utility will support SNIA's Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), allowing customers to manage EVA systems using the standard. In addition, HP is developing the ability to provision multivendor storage using SMI-S.

"We're really seeing the focus moving from getting the instrumentation into our devices, to enabling our external partners work with the interface that's being tested out," says Steve Jerman, storage management architect in HP's storage management software group.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch