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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Hull who wrote (20682)	2/10/1999 2:57:00 PM
From: Greg Hull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Reaction to FibreAlliance nwfusion.com Storage management standards scuffle? By DENI CONNOR Network World, 02/08/99 Storage giant EMC last week helped launch the FibreAlliance, a group that hopes to dictate standards for storage-area networks (SAN). But there is already such a group in place. In fact, there are four others, with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) being the furthest along in proposing storage standards. The fact that these groups are all aiming to do the same thing raises a number of questions: Will the groups confuse the market and lengthen the march toward standardization? Will there be multiple standards? Is the FibreAlliance too much of an EMC-centric effort? The EMC-led alliance came under criticism from those who prefer a more open approach to standards. The FibreAlliance is creating a Management Information Base (MIB) that will allow various third-party products to communicate with various EMC products. "We think customers' interests are better served if there is a broad effort across the industry that focuses the efforts of the entire industry, rather than focusing on alliances that are driven by a particular vendor perspective or are only focused on a portion of the solution," says Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing for the Storage Products Division of Compaq. But the EMC group had a few criticisms of its own, with members accusing the SNIA of not working fast enough. "Everyone is getting together and saying, 'Here is our vision, stay tuned.' The difference with the FibreAlliance is that EMC has joined 11 other companies with one common goal in mind: to significantly accelerate the adoption of fiber-based SANs into the marketplace," says Don Swatik, EMC vice president of product management. EMC is also a member of the SNIA. In fact, more than half of the members of the FibreAlliance are also members of the SNIA. An exclusive club? Notably absent from EMC's FibreAlliance are server vendors, such as Compaq, Intel, Data General and IBM, and infrastructure and storage vendors, such as Brocade Communications, Quantum and StorageTek. EMC, speaking for the FibreAlliance, says it will accept all comers as members. "The door is wide open for anybody who can make a contribution. This is not a closed club," Swatik says. But so far, most of these vendors have not been invited, and several vendors, first informed of the association by Network World, expressed concern about the vendor-specific status of EMC's MIB. At present, the FibreAlliance specification works only with EMC storage devices. Data General has interoperability relationships with an array of storage vendors, similar to what EMC is hoping to achieve with its new alliance. "How do you turn that into a standard?" asks Joel Reich, director of product management for Fibre Channel solutions at Data General's Clariion division.