PHOENIX -- Storage Networking World Spring 2003 -- It wasn't just the fact that SNW was once again held in a Sun-Belt city at an overpriced, antiseptic resort overrun with unruly toddlers that made this week's show familiar.
One of the central themes of this Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)-sponsored event was, once again, vendor cooperation and interoperability -- the very things the industry has not had the best track record in delivering.
But this time, storage networking vendors actually hit tangible milestones. Namely, SNIA came to a consensus that it was ready to lock down Version 1.0 of the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S), which it is offering free to anyone who cares enough to download it. The group also staged a nine-vendor SAN switch fabric interoperability demo, with the end goal of allowing storage systems suppliers to certify and support heterogeneous SAN fabric configurations (see Users Cheer Interop Demos and SNIA Releases SMI-S Version 1).
Not everything at SNW had such, um, broad resonance, though. Here's a compilation of other interesting things we saw and heard at the show:
Shirt Happens
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
