Sun storage offerings certified to conform with SNIA standards

Sun Microsystems' StorEdge products, from enterprise to workgroup offerings, have passed the Storage Networking Industry Association Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP). This achievement validates Sun's efforts to deliver interoperability and the resulting benefits of reduced cost and complexity through the implementation of SMI-S in its storage products.

The SMI-S is the work of the SNIA Storage Management Initiative (SMI) and delivers a reliable, tested interface that allows storage management systems to identify, classify, monitor and control physical and logical storage resources.

Over the last two years, the specification has been developed through the contributions of the industry's top engineers - including those at Sun - and is currently going through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) process to become recognised as an official standard.

To date, the Sun StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel array and the Sun StorEdge 9900 family of products have passed the conformance test. "These results follow the recent announcement of our alliance with AppIQ to deliver heterogeneous storage management solutions based on SMI-S," says Tertius Bezuidenhout, national systems engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA.

Additionally, he says, Sun is committed to having all future Sun StorEdge products and partner products conform to the specification. "Business is no longer focused on speeds and feeds. Companies need real solutions that meet pressing business issues such as cutting IT infrastructure expenditures and protecting existing data centre investments.

"By incorporating open standards such as the SMI-S, Sun is working to ensure that we're able to provide solutions that meet requirements for interoperability across enterprises."

"Sun is committed to developing open systems and working with standards, efforts that reflect a long-standing hallmark of Sun's business philosophy," Bezuidenhout concludes.