Standards must be good…
everyone has one
Guy Bunker, Chief Scientist, Veritas
 “STANDARDS
must be good, everyone has one”, or so the saying goes.
The unfortunate reality is that this is the case; however there is some
light at the end of the tunnel – at least in one area. A few years
ago the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA www.snia.org)
started down the long and sometimes tortuous path to creating a standard
for storage management. Initially codenamed ‘Bluefin’ the
draft standard was created by a number of vendors who had recognised the
problems, and had come together to do something about it. A survey by
‘The Info Pro’ in September 2003 found that for 54 per cent
of customers, improved management tools was still their Number One storage
issue. When the draft was complete, it was handed over to the SNIA, who
promptly adopted it and opened it up to a much wider community for review.
And so, the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) was born.
By creating a common management specification (the ‘S’ in
SMI-S), vendors were signing up to enable common management. The first
version of the specification was released and while it was primitive in
some ways, it was a huge step forwards. The most common tasks had been
standardised and companies from IBM to EMC to VERITAS have put aside their
competitive nature to reach agreement on how these tasks will be done.
However, just having a standard defined is not good enough, the next
steps are to get adoption of the standard and roll out products which
support it. This has been happening over the past few months and now there
are more than 100 products from more than a dozen vendors on the market
which support the standard. The next version is in progress and the launch
of a certification suite (Conformance Test Program, CTP) has help drive
adoption.
Vendors and customers
So why was it done? Vendors are notoriously unco-operative when they are
competitors, but it essentially it comes down to two things. It is good
for the customer and it is good for the vendor, and it is because of this
that SMI-S will succeed. Customers will be able to look for the SMI-S
compliant label on their hardware and software purchases and know that
it will fit into their environment seamlessly, without the need for new
management applications and the training that goes along with them. From
the vendor side, instead of having to negotiate with every other vendor
that they wish to interoperate with, they can write to a standard set
of APIs. This will enable them to bring new products to market faster
and reduce the costly development of proprietary APIs.
The next version of SMI-S expands the scope of management to cover more
functionality and covers more of the hardware that makes up a storage
network, e.g. improved HBA (host bus adapters) manageability as well as
resolving things like multiple paths to storage correctly. Standards die
unless they evolve, we are seeing SMI-S evolve and now that products are
reaching the market, we will see stronger adoption by even the smaller
players, who just can’t afford to remain proprietary any longer.
While some standards are innovating in the way which common management
can be achieved, others are pushing technology to improve network speeds.
Fibre channel standards are created and pushed under the auspices of Technical
Committee T11 (www.t11.org),
the committee within INCITS responsible for Device Level Interfaces and
which has been producing interface standards for high-performance and
mass storage applications since the 1970s. They have standards on the
drawing board that are looking to take us through to 10Gb in 2008. While
2008 seems a long way off, in computer terms this is actually quite close.
The technology needs to progress to a point where it is possible and then
the standards need to be applied. In some ways, from the outside, standards
seem to move glacially slowly, when inside it can often be a roller coaster
ride. Other protocols such as iSCSI have the same tough milestones, all
of which will benefit the consumer in the long run. By pushing the technology
it pushes the standard, which in turn makes vendors create products with
improved performance and features but which don’t mean the wholesale
rip and replace of existing technology.
Truly open architecture?
Will standards ever lead to a truly open architecture or truly open systems?
I believe the answer is that it will – from consumer pressure. Consumers
made the move to open systems because they didn’t like the tie-in
with proprietary systems and in the end they voted with their feet, or
rather with their chequebook. Storage is now at a point where standards
are emerging and words like ‘open’ are being applied to it,
those vendors who do not comply with standards will fall by the wayside.
However, standards do not mean the end of innovation. Vendors will still
have the opportunity to show how good they are and how much better their
product is – but by using standard mechanisms. SMI-S is based on
CIM (Common Information Model) which can be extended by vendors to meet
their needs. The extensions will, over time, become standardised and part
of SMI-S, but all the while vendors will continue to innovate and extend
the model. The commercial attractiveness of a proprietary solution, with
a high price attached to it has gone. Standards have won.
VERITAS Software Ltd are exhibiting at Storage Expo 2004, the UK's largest
and most important event dedicated to data storage, now in its 4th year,
the show features a comprehensive free education programme, and over 90
exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 13 - 14 October
2004. Tel: +44 (0)208 910 7966; fax: +44 (0)208 334 0718; www.storage-expo.com;
e-mail: harvey.bremner@reedexpo.co.uk
VERITAS Software Ltd, 350 Brook Drive, Green Park, Reading, RG2 6UH.
Tel: +44 (0)870 243 1080; fax: +44 (0)870 243 1081; www.veritas.com
IM@T Online September 2004
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