Standardization and Storage Networking Technologies

The emergence of open systems has had a profound impact on the development of data communications technologies. For the past 20 years, open systems have successfully undermined the monolithic, single-vendor dominance of data processing, forcing even the largest vendors to pledge allegiance to open, multi-vendor solutions. At the heart of open systems, the standardization process insures that customers will no longer be bound to a single supplier simply in order to benefit from new technical advances. In fact, even the most attractive new technologies must first demonstrate open standards support before customers will consider them for their data networks. The widespread rejection of proprietary initiatives means that even competing vendors must find ways to cooperate if any are to be successful in the market.

Open systems standardization is embodied in a variety of organizations. Standards organizations assume the challenging task of defining the common parameters of new technologies so that new products will be compliant and interoperable. In mainstream IP networking, for example, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has become the standards authority for a wide variety of technologies based on TCP/IP, including management, security and quality of service initiatives. When evaluating IP networking products, customers will often require compliance to the relevant RFCs (Requests for Comments) that detail the behavior of protocols or features. Failure to comply with the appropriate IETF standards often means disqualification from consideration.

Although standards bodies have considerable market influence, they draw their technical expertise from an army of volunteers. Participants may be individual technologists, academics, vendor representatives or paid consultants representing corporate or vendor interests. Generally, overt company identification or influencing is discouraged, although for participants there is usually little question of where individual companies stand on issues. Discussion and decision-making for technical matters are democratic and open to any interested individual, but it is expected that any input be informed and current with the stage of development of the standard at hand.

The challenge for vendors is to create products that are standards compliant in several areas and yet offer differentiating value to the customer. Since the vendors themselves are active participants in the standards process, it is in their interest to cooperate on fundamental features that promote the technology. It is also not unusual, however, for vendors to withhold unique technical advantages from the standards process in order to maintain a competitive edge. In some instances, as in the case of Fibre Channel switch standards, this stalling tactic results in customer dissatisfaction and retards technology adoption. The era in which an individual company could arrogantly declare itself to be the standard is long gone, although this reality has not yet hit home to some vendors.

Storage networking technology involves a number of standards organizations. Fibre Channel SAN vendors rely on the NCITS/ANSI T10 committee for SCSI protocol issues and NCITS/ANSI T11 committee for Fibre Channel-specific transport issues. In addition, some SAN management components rely on out-of-band SNMP methods which are standardized within the IETF. The Fibre Channel Management Integration MIB, for example, is defined in an Internet Draft, although Fibre Channel itself falls under the standards authority of NCITS/ANSI.

With the introduction of IP storage networking, use of Gigabit Ethernet for high performance transport introduces standards defined by the IEEE 802.3 committee. The protocols for moving block storage data over IP networks are being defined in the IETF via a number of Internet Drafts, as are the discovery and management mechanisms for IP storage. In addition, encapsulation of SCSI in TCP/IP necessarily involves compliance to NCITS/ANSI T10 standards. Vendors who provide connectivity to Fibre Channel storage devices must be NCITS/ANSI T11 compliant as well.

The parfait of standards helps insure interoperability and open systems commitment from lower level physical transports to upper layer protocols essential for the SAN infrastructure. On top of these, customers apply applications which, although not subject to the same standards rigor as the infrastructure, hopefully enjoy a firm open systems foundation to run upon.