Vendors aim to reassure user base

San and Nas champions act to allay fears

Vendors of the two major storage technologies have admitted that their respective markets are hamstrung by doubts over the future.

Separate initiatives were launched last week to address the reluctance of corporate buyers to commit to storage area network (San) and network attached storage (Nas) technology, in a bid to reassure users over the long-term future of their storage investments.

Storage virtualisation vendor DataCore has announced its line-up of technical partners joining its SANvantage partner programme, which is designed to address the problems of multi-vendor storage deployments.

It has announced a list of 16 vendors with which it aims to solve some of the interoperability problems that have dogged the San market.

Resellers and integrators in the UK have warned that the conflict over competing technology standards could persuade corporate buyers to postpone any buying decisions over storage until fears of technology lock-in have been resolved.

"This is about getting vendors together so they can present some unity to the market," said Datacore's director of marketing, Bharat Kumar, at the Euro Storage event in Prague last week.

"Our customers need to rationalise their data now, but they'll only commit themselves when they're confident they're not getting locked into a technology. This is about showing customers there's seamless interoperability between San vendors," he explained.

John Runne, executive vice president for corporate development at McData, one of its technology partners, said: "Combining SANsymphony with our switches gives customers a truly open San solution to address their growing storage concerns."

Separately, Network Appliances, a vendor that is championing the cause of the rival Nas, announced the latest developments in its Open Storage Networking strategy, launching the Data Fabric manager which it claimed will neutralise any of the cost-saving arguments made by San advocates.

"It'll take more than a few committees to solve the differences between all the proprietary vendors," said Stuart Gilks, technical services manager for northern Europe at Network Appliance. "It's unrealistic to expect people to make the leap into San when it took networking 20 years to get to a point where users didn't need to worry about common specs being met by different vendors."