SNIA's Grand Opening

On February 1, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) opened the doors of its new technology center in Colorado Springs. SNIA's center, in the old Digital storage plant, is Compaq's main location for storage technology development work. About 150 of the leading companies in the storage networking world raised $3 million for the facility, which comprises more than 14,000 square feet. In the lab, developers can test their current products with and against one another and help develop the next generation of storage standards.

Remarkably, most of those companies actually came to participate in a number of the technology demonstrations. However SNIA members compete in the market as they sell their products, SNIA is based on the idea that as a group, the member companies can all help to promote storage networking and their own success in that arena. To reach those goals, protocols must be widely accepted, devices must interoperate, and products must be easier for consumers and networking professionals to use.

SNIA's opening offered six demonstration projects:

Space precludes a full description of these demonstration projects, but you can find more detail about them on the SNIA Web site. Suffice it to say that more than a few engineers were tired but happy after a week in the lab working with multiple storage vendors' systems.

Who wasn't there? Of the big frame vendors—EMC, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hitachi, and IBM. Their absence might have a lot to do with the nature of the first set of demonstration projects. Those companies have the resources to do on a larger scale much of what SNIA does. And Brocade, which owns about 65 percent of the departmental fibre channel switch market, wasn't part of the switch demonstration.

Finally, some of the technical folks at SNIA are working on a theoretical model of storage networking a la the International Organization for Standards (ISO) Open System Interconnection (OSI) seven-layer cake networking model. This widely described model, although a work in progress, attempts to explain how Network Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs fit together in an overall design, where the layers meet, what the interface issues are, and how different services fit in. SNIA is working with the Fibre Channel Alliance, a group with its own model, to incorporate the two models into one. In a future column, I'll discuss this model in more detail.

All in all, SNIA—which is an army of volunteers—is off to a good start. For many in the storage networking world, seeing so many competitors in a room together fulfills a dream—one that will help them eventually meet everyone's needs.