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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (1123)	3/20/1999 11:39:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Do server/storage vendors innovate anymore? By Henry Baltazar March 16, 1999 5:29 PM ET Server vendors entering the world of enterprise-class storage have discovered that innovation has become less important than the ability to recognize and repackage the cutting-edge technologies of other companies' products. With high expectations and a yearning for new technology, a couple of weeks ago I ventured to a press event where Dell unveiled its SAN technology initiative. Staring into Dell's ebony wall of storage, my inner geek drooled with anticipation. Finally, a major company not named EMC was ready to deliver an end-to-end storage system for my Intel-based servers. Picking Dell's SAN solution apart component by component, however, I was somewhat disappointed that with the exception of the servers and elegant black cosmetic front casing, none of the other components were actually Dell's. The Dell SAN switch was made by Brocade, the Fibre Channel/SCSI bridge came from Crossroad Systems, the DLT library was from StorageTek, and Clariion supplied the storage arrays. Dell's wall of storage looked to me like a Frankenstein testbed that could have been thrown together stealing parts from N+I vendor booths. Innovation in an OEM Although it was lacking in technological innovation, I still believe Dell's SAN initiative was a good thing for its customers and the SAN community. Although Dell didn't create its switched Fibre Channel SAN, its early adoption of Brocade's switch will push competitors to offer more than the simple Fibre Channel hub solutions that they (Compaq and Hewlett-Packard) have been selling to customers over the past year and a half. In the fast-paced, cutthroat storage world, companies like Dell, HP and Compaq simply don't have the time and resources to reinvent the wheel just to keep their product lines pure and home-grown. In fact, in some cases, confining development within a company has yielded unsavory results. IBM's Serial Storage Architecture, for example, was home-grown and innovative, but it was branded as proprietary and has forced IBM to hop on the Fibre Channel bandwagon. It's not as easy as you think With an ever-growing number of SAN technology vendors popping up, simple things like product compatibility testing have become bigger problems than Fibre Channel standards bodies would like you to believe. Despite the interoperability testing that groups such as the Fibre Channel Community have sponsored, vendors like HP are still devoting considerable resources just to make sure the products they are thinking of selling on an OEM basis can interoperate seamlessly with their product lines. Another challenge for these "wrap-and-roll" vendors is incorporating manageability features for their freshly acquired products. With Fibre Channel management packages still in their infancy, vendors are forced to create basic management packages. In the end, server/storage vendors need to make sure the sum of their customer solution is greater than that of their OEM parts. Henry Baltazar, technical analyst at PC Week Labs, can be reached at henry_baltazar@zd.com. Gates looks t