History 2002: First Interoperable SAN, Thanks to SNIA

Although we’re still a long way off from resolving all the interoperability issues among SANs, efforts in this direction undertaken by SNIA are nevertheless beginning to bear fruit.

So it is that the latter’s Supported Solutions Forum (SSF) has just accepted and approved a first multi-vendor SAN solution qualified by 6 companies.

Heterogeneous Compaq, IBM and other server platforms can be connected to Compaq’s StorageWorks or IBM’s Shark using Brocade SilkWorm fabric switches. The storage subsystems operate on separate data zones sharing a comon fabric within the SAN, and are connected to the server via Emulex LightPulse, JNI FibreStar, and QLogic SANblade HBAs.

Simultaneous backup and recovery capabilities are supported with IBM’s Tivoli storage manager.

It remains to be seen whether other storage players will rally ’round’ to expand on the solution, already available to customers.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 168 on January 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.