Users Cheer Interop Demos

PHOENIX -- Storage Networking World Spring 2003 -- Several multivendor SAN interoperability demonstrations here this week staged by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are winning kudos from storage networking users, but these customers also say there's a lot more work the vendors must do on this front.

In a first for the industry, SNIA's multivendor SAN switch interoperability demo showed the systems of all the major vendors' working together in a fully meshed network. The goal is to let storage systems vendors certify -- and support -- heterogeneous SAN fabric configurations (see SNIA Holds Multivendor Demo).

"Absolutely flippin' incredible," says Audrey Harman, technical staff manager for Sprint Corp.'s (NYSE: FON) Computing Systems Technology Lab, about the multivendor switch demo. Harman's group tests and verifies computing technologies, including storage devices, for all of the carrier's divisions. Sprint's lab runs a large heterogeneous SAN environment in its 60,000-square-foot space in Overland Park, Kan.

Participants in the SNIA switch demo included Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Inrange Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: INRG), McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), and QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC). Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) did not participate directly, but rebranded versions of its switches were submitted for the demo by EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). Storage systems were provided by EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) (see Brocade Snubs Multivendor Demo).

"We should be competing on features and functions, not basic interoperability," says Mark Sorenson, VP and general manager of HP's storage software division.Harman is pleased that all the vendors -- well, nearly all of them, anyway -- are finally making a concerted effort to ensure their Fibre Channel switches are interoperable. She believes they had resisted taking this step to protect their market shares.

"We don't want to have to standardize on one vendor... SNIA is the perfect venue for this to happen," she says.

But other users, even though they whole-heartedly support the interoperability efforts, say they don't have a burning need for such multivendor SAN fabrics today. Gary Foote, IT storage manager at Aetna Inc., says his company is a Brocade shop, running mostly 16- and 32-port switches.

"I think we can learn from their experiences in getting this demo together," he says, "but I don't know if this would be as much help to us as storage management software that would give us better control over our entire SAN infrastructure."

Foote says that Aetna would expect to start replacing its current Brocade switches in another two years or so, at which point the company may consider other vendors. But a key prerequisite for deploying a multivendor SAN fabric will be management software that supports it. Even though packages like McData's SANavigator promise this functionality, it's not totally there yet, Foote says.Still, the user community's support for multivendor fabrics -- if only in principle -- appears to have softened Brocade's stance on this issue. Previously, Brocade explained that it wasn't participating directly in SNIA's multivendor switch test because there was no customer demand for this type of setup.

Now Brocade has changed its tune. In the future multivendor demos, "we'll be much more visible," says Tony DiCenzo, director of industry marketing at Brocade and chairman of SNIA's membership committee. "Next time, we'll have a big Brocade sign up over the multivendor switch test." [Ed. note: Yeah, that's sure to win hearts and minds.]

There's more testing yet to do, says Ray Dickensheets, principal member of Sprint's Computing Systems Technology Lab technical staff, who compares Fibre Channel SANs to "unruly teenagers" compared with the more genteel and mature Ethernet. "The vendors are getting better at [interoperability] every time I see them... [but] a more exhaustive set of testing is necessary."

Phil Mills, chairman of SNIA's Supported Solutions Forum and an engineer in IBM's storage systems group, says the vendors will continue to conduct more sophisticated testing, such as error injection, in the next few months. He says IBM is on track to approve a multivendor switch "solution set" by midyear.

In an interesting side note that reveals the sorry state of Fibre Channel interoperability, it turns out that two vendors of equipment that tests compliance with the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)'s SANmark -- I-Tech Corp. and Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR) -- haven't actually been running compatible versions of SANmark.Prior to assembling the multiswitch demo, each of the vendors ran their systems through a SANmark verification test. However, vendors that tested with Finisar's protocol analyzer, which included Brocade and Inrange, failed when tested on I-Tech's. Conversely, those that used the Finisar equipment -- Cisco, McData, and QLogic -- failed on the I-Tech test. Industry officials say Finisar and I-Tech are working together to iron out the kinks.

Meanwhile, the 19-vendor CIM-SAN 2 demonstration here shows systems and software working together using SNIA's Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), which is based on the Common Information Model (CIM) standard developed by the Distributed Management Task Force. The group released the first version of SMI-S this week in an 600-page [ed. note: lordy!] doc (see SNIA Releases SMI-S Version 1).

"Vendors can start building support for CIM into their products now that the first version of the standard is set," says DiCenzo.

SNIA is increasingly acting like a standards body, but DiCenzo says it still hasn't decided whether it will officially become one, which would involve getting accreditation from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). "We'll make that decision in a month," he says.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch