Anders Lofgren........
techweb.com
SANs facing interoperability issues -- Standards Interpreted
In Various Ways
Joseph F. Kovar
Irvine, Calif. -- Testing. Certification. Vendor bundles. Prayer. These are
among the various ways resellers taking their first steps into the storage area
network (SAN) market can help minimize the risk of interoperability between
various products.
Interoperability issues arise when resellers attempt to build a SAN using
components-in particular Fibre Channel equipment such as switches, hubs,
bridges, and storage subsystems-from more than one vendor.
Anders Lofgren, senior industry analyst at research firm Giga Information
Group, Cambridge, Mass., said he is surprised when equipment from multiple
vendors works together.
Varying interpretations of Fibre Channel standards is one reason
interoperability problems exist, Lofgren said. "On one extreme, you could say
the vendor wants to lock customers into their products. I don't think this is the
case. On the other hand . . . a vendor may be trying to get one thing to work.
The problem is you can't get everything to work at the same time."
Ambiguities cause problems, said Peter Dougherty, director of technical
marketing at McData Corp., Broomfield, Colo., and former co-chairman of
the interoperability committee of the Fibre Channel Association. He said the
industry still faces two obstacles: The standards are written out with few
diagrams, and lots of options are allowed.
To achieve interoperability, it is necessary to ensure communications between
the tape and disk drives that form physical storage, the networking gear, the
storage-management software, and the servers and host-bus adapters, said
Walt Hinton, vice president of strategy and marketing for enterprise
operations at Louisville, Colo.-based Storage Technology Corp.
(StorageTek).
Another problem is the challenge of getting various products to work together
at the firmware layer, said Peter Gibs, director of marketing at the Clariion
Advanced Storage Division of Data General Corp., Westboro, Mass.
For nonproprietary environments, the best way to avoid interoperability issues
seems to be to stay away from multivendor setups. "We advise our customers
to go with one vendor," said Giga's Lofgren. "Get the whole solution rather
than pieces."
In some cases, a single vendor provides all the components necessary to solve
a particular problem. That includes components sourced from other vendors.
For instance, Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, next month said it expects
to ship its StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution for Windows NT and
NetWare. It includes Fibre Channel host-bus adapters, hubs, tape controllers
and a SCSI digital linear tape library, along with software from Computer
Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y., and Seagate Software Inc.,
Scotts Valley, Calif.
In other cases, one vendor certifies that components from other suppliers will
work in a given situation when connected with that vendor's products.
Late last month, 3Com Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., introduced three different
SAN solutions featuring products from multiple vendors. The company is
working with Clariion on high-availability RAID solutions, with MTI
Technology Corp., Anaheim, Calif., on data consolidation, and Legato
Systems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., and MTI on a LAN-free backup.
Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif., recently demonstrated a
SAN based on products from Brocade Communications Systems Inc.,
Clariion, Dell Computer Corp., EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems,
Hewlett-Packard Co., LSI Logic Corp., McData, Microsoft Corp., Oracle
Corp., StorageTek, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Vixel Corp.
Several vendors said "plug fests" are a common way to test how well multiple
suppliers' products work together. Plug fests bring several manufacturers
together to test their products while excluding customers, channel partners and
the press. "There are ground rules," said Dougherty. "For instance, if one
product causes another product to break, the results are not published."
VARs seem to be most interested in sourcing Fibre Channel solutions from a
single vendor.
TriPole MicroAge Computer Center, Fountain Valley, Calif., is one example.
"We prefer to use one vendor's solutions," said Amer Jneid, technical director
at the reseller. "Otherwise, it becomes a mess."
Lewan & Associates Inc. is just starting to work with SANs, said John Nies,
account manager at the Denver-based reseller. The company's data center
customers are slow to accept the concept because of the risk involved with
new technologies, Nies said.
The company prefers to propose single-vendor SAN solutions, Nies said.
However, those do not necessarily reduce the difficulty of the installation, he
said. "The challenge is to integrate it in a customer's environment, which is
already heterogeneous," he said.
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Square Pegs, Round Hole
Interoperability problems related to confusion over standards arise when
resellers
try to build storage area networks (SANs) with components from various
vendors. One solution calls for one vendor to provide all components needed
to build a SAN. Another is for the vendor to certify that components from
other suppliers will work under a given situation. |
