Hi,

I just received this message from Auspex and thought that I would share it. I do not make any claims to the validity of the message. I only pass it along so that it may be verified. The writer does not quote the source, thus I am at first sceptical. Comments and suggestions on ways to verify are, of course, welcomed.

-gdg

-------- Original Message --------

Just had to put this out as food for thought. As Auspex begins building SAN gateways we are even more confident the analysts are correct about the convergence of NAS/SAN. Hope you enjoy.

Kevin Kirksey Auspex Systems

EMC's Fibre Alliance Woes and the state of SAN Interoperability On 7/23 Jo Maitland announced in UNIGRAM, that more than half of the Fibre Channel switch manufacturers (McData, Brocade, Ancor, Gadzoox and Vixel)

defected from EMC's Fibre Alliance, "fed-up with its slow pace on standardization". These 5 vendors have created their own, independent group, (the Open Standards Fabric Initiative - OSFI) charged with settings standards of interoperability between their own products and between their products and third party products.

Key points: 1. Standards exist for interoperability between switches, and third party products, but each vendor was using their own interpretation of those standards. This led to a lack of interoperability between different manufacturers switch products and the need for customers to purchase proprietary SAN solutions - something they are not interested in doing. This also led to lack of plug-and-play interoperability between switches and third party products (such as the HBAs needed in servers to connect to the SAN) - in turn forcing vendors of SANs to go through exhaustive interoperability testing every time a new product revision was released or a new product line was added to their suite of SAN products.

2. EMC set up the Fibre Alliance in February with great fanfare, splitting off from the SNIA to develop interoperability between components. Notably absent from the group were any other storage vendors such as IBM or Hitachi. As a result it was seen by many in the industry as a way for EMC to force it's own standards on the rest of the Fibre and SAN community. An effort

that has obviously failed - at least for now.

3. Despite the fact that the OSFI has stated that it is a subgroup within the FibreAlliance, EMC has stated that they will monitor the group to see if their work conflicts with what the Fibre Alliance is doing - in other words EMC will do what they're doing, without input or feedback from the OSFI,

leading yet again to dual (and dueling!) standards. An indication of this is contained with the report: "One analyst on the call said that working on

device level interoperability is fine but without an overall framework for managing those devices, the storage area network is still way off. A spokesperson for McData, a member of OSFI said, "We have to crawl before we can walk." "

4. A third group working on standards is the SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association) with over 100 members. A quote from the SNIA and from a member of the OSFI sums up the situation with multiple standards committees working on the same issues but in opposite directions. SNIA chairman, Roger Reich, director of Compaq's network storage division said of the new group: "I don't know where they are going or what they are doing, but if they need

backing in the form of money or talent we would be happy to speak to them." He added that the Fibre Alliance was a closed, profit-making group with a different agenda to the SNIA. In response to Reich, Greg Reyes, CEO of Brocade and a member of the OSFI said: "We are not interested in his offer."

Summary 1. Despite their protestations to the contrary, EMC is proprietary, will

continue to be proprietary and does not wish to work on a global scale with other vendors to open up interoperability of servers, storage devices and interconnect products such as switches, hubs and HBAs. Customer purchasing EMC storage devices or SAN implementations will be locking themselves into the high price leader and into a proprietary solution. 2. This lends further credence to Auspex stated vision (backed up by analysts) of NAS as the "Intelligent Gateway" to the SAN, and that NAS should be implemented today with an eye toward tomorrows SAN implementation (i.e. SAN should not be implemented today). Install SAN today at your own risk, if for no other reason than a lack of standards and a lack of a current methodology of moving toward a single set of globally accepted standards.