SNIA gossip:
performancecomputing.com
Myth shattering...In Monterey I learned that the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) was attempting a bit of mind control of its own when it held its teleconference love-fest back on April 5. At the time, press and analysts were told how much progress had been made on defining heterogeneous storage-area-network specifications. SANs are becoming the hottest topic in IT these days because they promise vastly improved ways to manage, move, and store data. Today, SANs are only usable if you buy into a single-vendor approach, something few IT managers want, so heterogeneous standards would seem to be essential if the market is to take off, hence SNIA's work to define specifications that ANSI or the IETF (and eventually, ISO) will agree to. Although we were assured during the phone conference call that all was rosy with SNIA's efforts, I learned this week that Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Veritas, and others were furious with EMC's Fibre Channel Alliance and Enterprise Storage Network plans. According to a source who was at the meeting, one Compaq representative almost needed to be physically restrained "from flying across the table and throttling" EMC's rep. Why does EMC's efforts to build standards around its storage technology seem more egregious than, say, Sun's StorX initiative? According to another SNIA source, it's because EMC alone has the ability to establish de facto standards. "They're the dominant player in the glass house. If they get enough companies to play by their rules, SNIA is dead," he said. |
