Still, the user community's support for multivendor fabrics -- if only in principle -- appears to have softened Brocade's stance on this issue. Previously, Brocade explained that it wasn't participating directly in SNIA's multivendor switch test because there was no customer demand for this type of setup.
Now Brocade has changed its tune. In the future multivendor demos, "we'll be much more visible," says Tony DiCenzo, director of industry marketing at Brocade and chairman of SNIA's membership committee. "Next time, we'll have a big Brocade sign up over the multivendor switch test." [Ed. note: Yeah, that's sure to win hearts and minds.]
There's more testing yet to do, says Ray Dickensheets, principal member of Sprint's Computing Systems Technology Lab technical staff, who compares Fibre Channel SANs to "unruly teenagers" compared with the more genteel and mature Ethernet. "The vendors are getting better at [interoperability] every time I see them... [but] a more exhaustive set of testing is necessary."
Phil Mills, chairman of SNIA's Supported Solutions Forum and an engineer in IBM's storage systems group, says the vendors will continue to conduct more sophisticated testing, such as error injection, in the next few months. He says IBM is on track to approve a multivendor switch "solution set" by midyear.
In an interesting side note that reveals the sorry state of Fibre Channel interoperability, it turns out that two vendors of equipment that tests compliance with the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)'s SANmark -- I-Tech Corp. and Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR) -- haven't actually been running compatible versions of SANmark.
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