A demonstration at this year's Storage Network World Conference in Orlando, succeeded in connecting 47 storage companies' devices to a 40TB storage architecture.
Sponsored by Computerworld and non-profit organisation, the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), the demonstration was designed to highlight interoperability between numerous vendors' products.
The seven demonstrations included 47 companies from numerous storage networking disciplines. The total configuration included 53 users, 40TB of storage, 300TB of backup capability, 17 storage enclosures, 13 tape libraries, six metropolitan area networks, three wide area networks, an Ethernet backbone for network management, and 600 ports of Fibre Channel backbone for storage.
"The interoperability demonstration included numerous real-world applications directly addressing concerns from the IT community," says Larry Krantz, SNIA chairman. "Spanning everything from SAN management, SAN backup, to enterprise storage solutions, the display of multi-vendor cooperation is unprecedented in the industry today. This demonstrates the commitment by Fibre Channel vendors to eliminate interoperability concerns."
David Deming, SNW Interoperability Lab Coordinator and Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) president, agrees: "This demonstration shows how Fibre Channel products have matured and work together to provide the IT community with a robust, high performance storage network solution. It consisted of production level products widely available from multiple vendors and addressed applications that will immediately benefit IT users who utilise Fibre Channel SANs."
FCIA is an international organisation of manufacturers, systems integrators, developers, systems vendors, industry professionals and end-users, with more than 190 members.
Vendors included Agilent, Brocade, Cisco, Compaq, Computer Associates, EMC, Gadzoox, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Legato, Nortel Networks, Quantum ATL, Sun Microsystems, Veritas and Vixel.
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