The slippery issue of standardisation
Standards. Where would we be without them? In the IT industry, most likely.
The standards issue hasraised its head again with the unveiling of Bluefin, an agreement between 16 storage vendors which stipulates that anything sold as Bluefin will be interoperable with any other Bluefin offering.
The standard is currently being approved by the Storage Networking Industry Association. This is great news, and a step forward for an industry in which interoperability has been a problem for years.
Standards are particularly important for the storage sector because data needs to move securely between heterogeneous networks.
The dream of networked storage has reached only partial fruition. The storage area network (San) is now the basic unit of storage, but a world in which Sans from different vendors all work together, and where data is manageable virtually, is still a pipe dream.
This is about standards, and they are confusing. Take IP storage, which covers data transfer over protocols such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel IP.
Ian Lockhart, strategic products manager at the Infrastructure Design Practice, said: "iSCSI is a deliverable technology, but it is not a standard."
Like all attempts to impose standards on the IT industry, Bluefin does not cover all vendors and products. And other standards are always vying to become the chosen one.
EMC has been pushing an interoperability technology called Widesky for a number of years. Some say that EMC's interest in interoperability between high-end storage technologies has something to do with Hitachi Data Systems grabbing much of its market share and moving into the reseller channel.
Hitachi now has a multi-channel strategy in the US, where it has claimed to offer the best technology in the market. EMC, too, has not been slow to develop a channel. It has been selling its Clariion products through resellers for a while now, using Ideal Enterprise Solutions as its distributor in the UK.
The interest in standards says much about the current state of the storage market. Last year the value of the market fell by eight per cent, despite the widespread belief that storage was recession-proof. The figure actually fell because of hardware price pressures; the amount of storage boxes shipped actually rose.
If resellers want to side step the standards issue, they should steer clear of the ailing hardware market, and opt for vendor-agnostic software that helps enterprises unite storage elements under one management system.
Bluefin could take a while.