In October 2002, SNIA staged a multivendor switch plugfest at SNW in Orlando, Fla., but this was not a fully functional SAN, according to association officials. In that demo and others like it, switches from different vendors "haven't been able to do anything other than discover each other," says Sheila Childs, SNIA's chairwoman and a VP at Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO). (See Storage OEMs Warm Up to Cisco.)
The latest effort by the SSF is to move beyond simply claiming to be interoperable and have vendors actually back that up with support contracts. "Customers want to know that they can buy our switch and swap it out for another vendor's switch -- not that they'd want to -- and know that it's just going to work," says Mike Naylor, director of product marketing at Inrange. "We're trying to prove that."
The vendors involved in the SSF demo started discussing the multivendor switch solutions last June and assembled equipment starting in December in SNIA's Colorado Springs technical testing facility (in a space previously occupied by Compaq). That entire switch setup will be transplanted to Phoenix for SNW next month.
Notwithstanding the lack of Brocade's full participation, Mills says he's encouraged by the level of cooperation in preparing for the multivendor switch demo.
"When we first started this, people said, 'You're not going to be able to do this. These are competitors, they're strong companies, they're not going to work together,' " he says. "But once you get past the IBM hat or the HP hat, we're pretty much the same kind of people. We've had a fun time, and we think we're doing something important."
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