Harman is pleased that all the vendors -- well, nearly all of them, anyway -- are finally making a concerted effort to ensure their Fibre Channel switches are interoperable. She believes they had resisted taking this step to protect their market shares.
"We don't want to have to standardize on one vendor... SNIA is the perfect venue for this to happen," she says.
But other users, even though they whole-heartedly support the interoperability efforts, say they don't have a burning need for such multivendor SAN fabrics today. Gary Foote, IT storage manager at Aetna Inc., says his company is a Brocade shop, running mostly 16- and 32-port switches.
"I think we can learn from their experiences in getting this demo together," he says, "but I don't know if this would be as much help to us as storage management software that would give us better control over our entire SAN infrastructure."
Foote says that Aetna would expect to start replacing its current Brocade switches in another two years or so, at which point the company may consider other vendors. But a key prerequisite for deploying a multivendor SAN fabric will be management software that supports it. Even though packages like McData's SANavigator promise this functionality, it's not totally there yet, Foote says.
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