EMC, IBM, Hitachi, Compaq: Rivals Become Storage Buddies

Solution providers hailed an initiative by four major storage vendors promoting SAN interoperability, saying it will help eliminate problems associated with multivendor SANs.

The initiative by IBM, EMC, Compaq Computer and Hitachi Data Systems involves testing and certification and an agreement to cooperate on providing support for each other's products.

"If it really works, and they really share the necessary information, it definitely makes a difference," says Greg Hagerl, director of sales for Lewan & Associates, a Denver-based solution provider. "There will be less finger-pointing."

The cooperative support agreement is great from both a customer and a solution provider perspective, says Michael Fanelli, western regional manager for Sales Strategies, a Metuchen, N.J.-based solution provider.

"We don't have to spend time trying to find someone to accept responsibility," he says.

Solution providers will benefit from new opportunities to break into client data centers, says Keith Trotte, account representative at Sales Strategies.

Typical EMC or IBM shops are not open to other suppliers once a vendor has become entrenched, says Trotte. Now clients have the opportunity to work with multiple suppliers, opening the way for solution providers to get into such closed shops.

"This changes the landscape," he says. "It's good from our standpoint."

In the announcement earlier this week, the vendors said they tested and certified that their storage arrays will work together on SAN configurations using 128-port Fibre Channel configurations based on either Brocade's switches or McData's SAN directors.

As long as each vendor's storage arrays and associated servers are connected to their own specific logical zones, such zones will be able to co-exist on the storage network without the interoperability issues that traditionally affect SANs, the vendors said.

Furthermore, the four vendors signed bilateral cooperative support agreements under which clients with multivendor SANs or their solution providers can contact any of the four for support regardless of which product caused the problem.

If the contacted vendor's support team cannot solve the problem, it will tap support teams from the other vendors, giving the client or solution provider a single point of contact, the companies say.

Notably absent from the group are Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, both major storage vendors. However, the consortium is open to increased membership as leadership in the program is being passed to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

The certified interoperable solutions will help level the playing field between vendors, says Mike Harrison, director of business alliances for IBM storage.

"For the last 10 years, solutions have been proprietary, limiting the number of solutions available [to customers]," he says. "Now customers can make their buying decision based on the merits of what's available today."

Don Swatik, vice president of global alliances at EMC, says cooperative support agreements are not necessarily new. EMC and Compaq have such an arrangement for Compaq servers connected to Symmetrix arrays. "[The] difference is that this covers storage from multiple vendors," he says.

Swatik cautioned against confusing cooperative support agreements with maintenance contracts. "Customers will still have their separate maintenance contracts with Compaq and EMC," he says.

Now that the groundwork for the SAN configurations and the cooperative support agreements is laid out, Swatik says, the programs will fall under the auspices of SNIA. Other vendors will be welcome to join but will face several months of testing and paperwork, he says.

The four vendors started working on the project in December, and at the time were already looking for ways to get more vendors involved, Harrison says. To make it clear it was not a closed club, they brought in SNIA. "The more companies that join, the better," he says. "As more companies belly-up to the concept, it will help the industry."

The next logical candidates include Sun and HP.

This week's announcement is confusing, says Denise Shiffman, vice president of marketing for Sun's network storage. "It sounded proprietary, but if SNIA is involved, it must be open," she says.

It is important to test for interoperability, and since SNIA is involved, Sun will eventually get involved as well, Shiffman says. "Sun is on the SNIA board, so we are watching."

Don Kleinschnitz, general manager of scalable network storage solutions for HP, says the interoperability announcement is basically a marketing push, and that each vendor's topology is different.

When industry standards are set, HP's solutions will fit those standards, Kleinschnitz says. "I'm glad to see that the industry is following in the direction HP has been taking for the last two years," he says.