The Road to Unification?

Of course, despite the deep-seated fears of commoditization and of the emergence of a single market share leader, there have been some cooperative development efforts ”occasions when storage vendors seemed to rise a bit above the quagmire of storage industry politics. In some instances, cooperation between competitors was the result of self-interest and a response to clearly articulated consumer demands ”particularly, when such demands emanate from Fortune 100 customers, who, analysts claim, collectively account for more than 60 percent of annual storage industry revenues .

An example of this dynamic was the development of Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), a protocol for tunneling Fibre Channel “based storage commands and data between distant "SAN islands" using a TCP/IP network. In late 2000, several large enterprise customers ”common to both Brocade Communications Systems, a Fibre Channel fabric switch vendor, and Cisco Systems, an IP networking technology goliath ”demanded that their vendors work together to deliver such a tunneling protocol to interconnect small Fibre Channel SANs at geographically dispersed locations. An announcement of a joint initiative between the companies met surprised looks from attendees at the press conference where it was made. Only weeks before, spokespersons for Cisco, who advocated the use of IP networks, rather than Fibre Channel, to provide the plumbing for storage area networks, had criticized the Fibre Channel Industry Association's announcement of a forthcoming two-speed (or 2 Gigabit-per-second) version of its protocol, calling it " yesterday 's bandwidth tomorrow." Cisco posited that 10-speed gigabit Ethernet, at 10 gigabits per second, would appear in the market shortly, mitigating the value of the accelerated FC protocol.

However, on an October morning in 2000, cooperation was the theme, and prior competitive utterances by the companies were described as water under the bridge. Representatives of Cisco and Brocade appeared together at the press event and described the synergies between the two companies and their desire to work together to meet the needs of their common customers. FCIP was developed from the initiative, referred to the IETF for consideration as a standard, and work began on creating a blade for a Cisco switch to support FC tunneling.

In June 2002, however, the relationship between the two companies was severed by Cisco with all the trappings of an ugly Hollywood divorce. The IP networking equipment manufacturer claimed that the goal of developing a tunneling protocol that could be supported on all Fibre Channel switches remained valid, but that the implementation of the protocol had been corrupted by Brocade, which had helped engineer the solution so that it would only work with its own switches. Still, an IETF open standards protocol was born of the initiative.

Another example of industry cooperation was BlueFin, a joint undertaking of several erstwhile storage market competitors intended to advance the cause of Fibre Channel SAN interoperability. Bluefin's creators (who comprised most major storage platform manufacturers in 2002, as well as several prominent storage management software vendors) held what could be described as secret meetings for about six months and, at a cost of nearly $500,000, produced an open standards-based mechanism that enabled the products of different vendors to "discover" each other in the same Fibre Channel SAN (fabric). BlueFin was hailed as a huge breakthrough in heterogeneous Fibre Channel SAN development, and one that laid the groundwork for subsequent management services that are not supported in the Fibre Channel protocol itself. ^[9]

The jury is still out on the true meaning and importance of BlueFin, which has since been turned over to SNIA for further development as "SMI-S," but it is reasonably certain that the vendors involved in its development were compelled to cooperate both by the slower-than-expected adoption rate of FC SANs and also by often- heard complaints of their largest customers, many of whom had fielded heterogeneous storage platforms over the years and saw the lack of support of Fibre Channel SANs for heterogeneous configurations as an impediment to implementation of the technology. Now, as then, few companies have been willing to do a "forklift upgrade" of their existing storage investment in order to deploy a homogeneous Fibre Channel SAN. Most savvy consumers vocalize deep concerns over the ultimate impact of homogeneous storage architecture: dependency on a single vendor.

These and other examples testify to the fact that, to storage vendors, the only thing more frightening than commoditization, and single vendor dominance , is consumer revolt. In the current economic reality, one in which cash-strapped consumers are putting off storage acquisitions and looking for ways to leverage storage networking and storage management technologies to curb IT costs, the pressure is on the vendor community to facilitate their needs. The cost of failure could be the decision by the consumer to give its business to an eager -to- please competitor ”and competitors are in no short supply.