SNIA Comes to Europe

1999-09-21

The spirit of co-opetition was well and truly alive last week at the inaugural International Membership Development Conference of the Storage Industry Networking Association. With title like that, is it any wonder we talk in acronyms. So what’s it all about?

The goal of the SNIA is “to develop specifications which … form the basis of standards to enable compatibility among storage networking products”. Essentially, this is about software standards, not hardware: for a start, the SNIA wants to remain device-agnostic, not wanting to tread on the toes of existing hardware standardisation efforts such as the Fibre Channel Alliance. Secondly, hardware technologies are moving very fast: the SNIA sees its role as defining a device-independent layer which will continue to be valid well into the future. In practice, this means that the SNIA is running a number of initiatives, including:

- working groups are responsible for defining specifications in areas such as device management and (storage network based) data management

- conferences and marketing activities are planned to enable the storage networking message to be broadcast to the wider community

- an interoperability lab is to be developed, which will enable manufacturers to test their equipment and their software against certification criteria (SNIA-marking, perhaps)

Overall, the aim is that devices from different manufacturers will not only be plug-compatible, but also they will be able to communicate with each other and be managed centrally. For example, a goal scenario would be that two storage devices from different vendors could be used to provide storage for a single application such as SAP.

What is interesting about the work of the SNIA is that it has been set up to solve specific issues that have arisen through the development of networked storage, both SAN and NAS included. Rather than being driven by the marketing departments or the standards bodies, both of whom have had a tendency to deal with possibility rather than reality, the SNIA has its work cut out to solve problems, for example of interoperability, which exist today for managers of heterogeneous storage networking devices. The downside is, of course, that the wider community will have to wait before any SNIA-marked products exist. The first results are starting to come out of the working groups, for example common interface modules and SNMP MIBs are appearing, however it will be a good six months before we see anything turned into lab-tested products. There is, of course, a sense of urgency coming from the SNIA camp so we can hope for some concrete products to be ready for the post-Y2K thaw.

The SNIA already boasts a powerful membership. Board member companies include Veritas, EMC, StorageTek, Sun, HP, Quantum, Compaq, Dell, IBM and Microsoft. Also, the organisation, which has traditionally gained income from memberships, now has serious sponsorship money behind it and claims to have “the mindshare of the industry”, all of which stands it in good stead for the future. The SNIA appears to have its act together and its willingness to have an international (or global) presence is to be welcomed, as it has in the past been seen as a West Coast club. Prospective members should visit the all-new SNIA web site.

(First published 21 September 1999)