So why isn't Brocade interested in attending this party? According to Brocade spokeswoman Fenella Tigner, "We are not seeing that much demand for multivendor fabrics among customers today, but we certainly will work with our partners to assist customers who are looking for it."
Another possibility is that Brocade doesn't see any need to play nice with other switch vendors, as it owns a majority share of the FC switch market. In a recent report, Dell'Oro Group estimated that Brocade's worldwide share of the SAN switch market was 58 percent in 2002. Its next closest competitor, McData, had a 29 percent share (see SAN Switch Sales Swell in 02).
The charter of SNIA's SSF is to test and certify multivendor storage networking configurations, which the respective vendors then agree to fully support. Mills says the SNW switch event is only a demonstration, but he says the group's "strong intent" is to follow the interop demo within three months with multivendor SAN switch solution sets.
"The point is, while putting this stuff together may have been impossible a few years ago, it's now possible," says Mills.
Think of the SSF's supported solutions sets as "N+1" certifications. Whereas inter-vendor certifications are typically negotiated between two companies, the SSF brings together three or more. For example, in the case of the multivendor switch solutions, IBM would decide which multivendor switch fabric -- say, McData and Brocade -- it wants to support with its storage arrays.
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