SNIA-Supported Solutions Forum Announces Open SAN Initiative

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced Open SAN, the first major interoperability initiative launched as part of its SNIA Supported Solutions Forum (SSF). The Open SAN solution set will enable data mirroring between geographically dispersed sites for backup and recovery and let remote Storage Area Network (SAN) islands connect and create a single fabric. SNIA members participating in the initiative include Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), INRANGE Technologies, IBM, LEGATO Systems, Storage Technology (StorageTek), and VERITAS Software.

According to SNIA, the Open SAN solution will benefit customers with the following business requirements: the need to maintain 24 x 7 operations with the ability to switch to a remote location for disaster recovery; the need to run mission-critical IT applications and mirror databases for business continuity; a highly available, reliable, scalable SAN with the flexibility to add ports on demand without disrupting service or sacrificing performance; aggregate storage systems that use independent software-vendor offerings for path failover and load balancing; using and/or consolidating tape storage; connecting remote SAN islands into a single fabric; and requiring local or remote LAN-free backup and recovery with drive sharing while supporting a full disaster-recovery environment. You can find more information about the solution at the SNIA Web site.

http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/supported_solutions/reg_sol