By Pia Heikkila, 18 April 2000 00:15
NEWS Political jostling by vendors is holding back the adoption of storage area networks (SANs). Many of the speakers at Veritas' recent user conference agreed that vendor self-interest - and the various competing industry bodies - are hindering their adoption. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Fibre Channel Association and the FibreAlliance are all involved in the search for common ground. Mike Quinn, product marketing manager at Quantum, believes that a lack of open discussion between the groups has prevented the forging of the new standards. He said: "It seems that every vendor is with one association or another. It would be nice if these associations talked a bit more with each other and not be political." Simon Gay, storage specialist for Computacenter, said SAN standards are still evolving. "There is still room for improvements and I'm sure in the next two to five years there will be an enormous amount of changes not dissimilar to those we saw in the LAN market 10 years ago." However, not all the vendors are unanimous in their concern. Frederik Fabricius, storage systems specialist at IBM, said: "I do not agree with the general comments. You'll always run into SAN purists who will argue that there's a long way to go, but in terms of underlying technology - Ffbre-connect between multiple devices - that's here today." More on this can be seen in this week's News in View programme (http://www.silicon.com/a37028 )
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