That was the view of Rick Sewell, Compaq's Asia Pacific marketing manager for Enterprise Storage Group. With some 20 years experience in the IT industry, Sewell has worked in countries all over the Asia Pacific region, giving him a unique insight into the industry here.
He gives an example: The implementation of a CRM application will increase the amount of storage an organization requires, as will any new application. Many application vendors issue lists of certified hardware configurations so that customers know what hardware, servers and storage, have been tested and shown to work with this application. Therefore, it is in the interest of all storage vendors to have alliances with not only CRM vendors but also all major application vendors.
The major benefit to the customer of these alliances is that the choice of hardware platforms is simplified and has been proven to work.
According to Sewell, storage interoperability is available today and the initial offerings allow organizations that have disparate storage products to create a single SAN with multi-vendor data zones.
To ensure that the Open Storage Area Network (SAN) becomes a reality for customers, IBM and Compaq formed an alliance in July last year to develop interoperability standards between each company's products. The initial results of this alliance were demonstrated at Storage Networking World in November 2000 where data was migrated over a SAN between IBM and Compaq storage platforms and IBM storage platforms were backed up over the SAN to a Compaq tape library.
In June this year, Compaq and five other storage-networking companies announced a number of Open SAN supported solutions that would allow Compaq and other storage company's products to share the same SAN fabric, albeit in separate data zones. Compaq is also a founding member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) an organization committed to defining open standards in storage networking.
In the next 24-36 months, this interoperability will be enhanced to remove the requirement for separate data zones so that there will be total interoperability between different storage vendor's products.
When it comes to integration with existing equipment, Sewell says that the key requirement is not necessarily to fit in seamlessly with existing customer technologies but to provide the maximum investment protection for the customer.
With this in mind, customers can choose open connectivity technologies such as SCSI and Fiber Channel. They can also upgrade older SCSI controllers to Fiber Channel. This allows older storage devices to be added to a fiber channel SAN to take advantage of higher throughput and longer distances from the server.
