SNIA Members Announce Evolution of Open SANs

Members of the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA's) Supported Solutions Forum (SSF) have announced increased cooperation to strengthen cross-vendor support. In June 2001, six members of the SNIA SSF (Brocade Communications Systems, Compaq, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems--HDS, IBM, and McDATA) agreed to register and qualify their storage-networking solutions with SNIA to ensure cross-vendor support. Last week, Quantum, Legato Systems, StorageTek, and VERITAS Software, already SSF members, agreed to join the alliance.

The solution set released last year included joint qualification of two open Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions among Compaq, EMC, HDS, and IBM that enabled data zones containing storage products from any of the companies to coexist on a single, shared Fibre Channel fabric. As part of the agreement, the companies also signed a cooperative support agreement intended to simplify customer support in multivendor environments.

The new solution set announced last week adds additional backup capabilities and multivendor disk storage from Compaq, EMC, HDS, and IBM; multivendor tape storage from IBM, Quantum, and StorageTek; and multivendor backup and recovery software from Legato, IBM Tivoli Storage, and VERITAS. The solutions must run on either a Brocade fabric or a McDATA fabric.

"This is a strategic step forward in the evolution of cooperatively supported, open SAN interoperability sponsored by SNIA and the SSF," said SNIA Board Member Clod Barrera. "These industry leaders are working together to develop solutions that truly benefit end users and solve real world business problems."

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