Playing Nice, the Standards Way

PHOENIX -- How many storage vendors does it take to plug a disk array into a heterogenous SAN?

The answer is: 14, for now. At a gathering today during the Storage Networking World tradeshow here, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) trotted out 10 storage array vendors and four switch vendors whose wares conform to its new interoperability standard.

The combined 108 products from these stalwarts will receive SNIAs much coveted logo in conspicuous appreciation of their compliance with its Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).

Ah, the warmth! The camraderie... “This brings together vendors who are in the street competing for market share,” says Ray Dun, chairman of the SNIA Storage Management Forum, who also works at Sun Microsystems.

“Most of you in the audience are family,” said Roger Reich of Veritas Software, who chairs SNIA's SMI committee. [Ed. note: Stop! I'm welling up!]Such was the moist tone of a news conference-turned-backpat-fest for vendors bragging about making their products work together. And the room was full, with only a smattering of press at the session. Representatives from the following companies showed up to take bows:

After the announcement, the group posed for a photo to mark the day for posterity. (Unfortunately, we couldn't get a copy, but here's a reasonable facsimile.)

A few customers who sit on SNIA’s board were on hand to lay out the goals of the spec group. “We’re shooting for the meat and potatoes of day-to-day activity,” said Ray Dickensheets of Sprint Corp. (NYSE: FON). “We want to be able to put an array on the network and have it automatically discovered.” Dickensheets said other automated processes will include Fibre Channel LUN masking, LUN mapping, zoning, and zone management.

Sadly, autodiscovery and other tasks in multivendor storage networks are still protracted processes that include buying or writing proprietary software to get different vendors’ products to work together. Sometimes one vendor will have different management tools for its various products.

And it will take awhile for the SMI-S spec to make a difference. Asked if customers can junk their proprietary legacy management systems and interoperability matrices, Reich said, “No, they can’t. Vendors are in the process of shipping SMI-S interfaces. Our target is all storage shipping with SMI-S interface by the end of 2005.” Other types of products such as HBAs and routers will be certified in the next stage.Twelve months or more is a long time -- time enough for vendors to get cold feet or simply lose interest. Some of you were still in diapers when the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) first emerged to solve the world's system management problems via the Common Information Model (CIM). Does anyone here recall the Common Management Interface? The Distributed Management Environment? The Systems Management element of the Object Management Group? The Element Systems Spam Management Environment of the Distributed Spam Element Systems Distributed Element? To some extent, all of these were meant to solve at least some of the problems outlined by SNIA. Many of them were endorsed by some of the same vendors who showed up today -- HP, IBM, and Sun among them.

Most of these onetime problem-solving "standards" are, like aging rock stars from the sixties, either dead or unrecognizable. In every case, their demise was hastened by vendor infighting or lack of support.

The storage networking market is a family, yes, but like other technology market segments, it more closely resembles the Borgias than the Brady Bunch. Only if a standard saves vendors money will it survive. Until it does, all the playing nice in the world will amount to little more than disappointment for users desperate to solve network problems.

At least one vendor is positive the savings are there. “This [SMI-S] will save a ton of money for us,” says Jonathan Buckley, McData’s VP of software platforms. “We have eight interfaces in the company now we have to support. This will save us a lot of engineering and testing.”

We'll keep an open mind. But until the results start panning out in the form of live network deployments, we'll hold our applause. Show us the meeting of users that actually have achieved the promise of SMI-S.— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch