Developing Standards For Storage Area Networks.

One of our friends from Tivoli attempted to describe the intricacies of the Storage Area Network (SAN) standards maze to our public relations person. I have no trouble at all seeing how difficult it is for outsiders looking in to understand the interrelationships between these organizations, including our PR person.

A number of groups, consortiums, and initiatives have been formed to develop standards for SANs. This article attempts to clarify each organization's roles and objectives and their relationship within the total framework. Because McDATA's Fibre Channel director and switches physically occupy a very centralized position in SAN activities, we have to be involved in all of these standards-facilitating activities. We want to make sure that the interests of our customers are met. We also want to assure that an open, integrated architecture is defined that meets the SAN requirements of the entire enterprise.

Being embroiled in a standards initiative is very much in vogue today--especially if you're involved in producing a myriad of products that make up a SAN. This could be construed as somewhat self-serving, but it's actually very positive--having all of these vendors, who represent the various facets of an open system, working together to develop standardized ways of interfacing their products with those of the rest of the industry. It's just as good for the manufacturers as it is for the users.

There is one primary body that governs standards--the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Under the auspices of ANSI, there are working groups assigned to the various technologies. In the case of SANs, the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) T11 working group, comprised mainly of engineers, meets on a bimonthly basis to develop standards. The T11 group has voting members who represent member companies and representatives of non-member companies. Subcommittees are normally able to spend one to two hours every other month on a particular standard. At this pace, it's not unusual for standards to take years to be published.

On a side note, some manufacturers that represent the majority of market players establish a de facto standard long before the ANSI standard is ever written. Now, de facto standards are much harder to establish in an open systems network environment where multiple vendors provide products that perform essentially the same or similar functions.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual and holds meetings three times per year. Although it is a loosely self-organized group of people who make technical and other contributions to the engineering and evolution of the Internet, it is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet standard specifications.

The IETF mission includes identifying and proposing solutions to operational and technical problems on the Internet, specifying the development or usage of protocols and the near-term architecture to solve these problems, and making recommendations to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) regarding the standardization of protocols and protocol usage. It facilitates the technology transfer from the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) to the wider Internet community and provides a forum for the exchange of information within the Internet community between vendors, users, researchers, agency contractors, and network managers. It is not a traditional standards organization, although many specifications are produced that become standards.

A number of smaller groups, consortiums, and initiatives have been formed to also facilitate the standards generating process by concentrating focus on specific pieces and holding more frequent meetings. Generally, the members of these groups are also members of the ANSI working committees and participate in the IETF. It is not unusual to find companies being members of all standards generating bodies. Examples of more focused groups include SNIA, the FibreAlliance, and OSFI.

SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) is an international computer system industry forum of developers, integrators, and IT professionals who evolve and promote storage networking technology and solutions. It is spread thin when it comes to focusing on specific devices or technologies because it covers all storage products.

The FibreAlliance was formed by EMC to concentrate on device management. The FibreAlliance goal is to develop and implement common methods for managing heterogeneous Fibre Channel-based networks of storage systems and computer servers, also known as storage area networks, or SANs. Common management allows users to choose interconnect devices freely without concern for management capabilities across a heterogeneous environment. It also negates the necessity of learning different management platforms for each product.

The Open Standards Fabric Initiative (OSFI), formed by the Fibre Channel switch manufacturers, is hammering out the details of Fibre Channel switch-to-switch interoperability. Responding to customer requests for interoperability, McDATA spearheaded the formation of OSFI, where the five participating manufacturers represent 100% of the currently shipping Fibre Channel switch market. They include Ancor, Brocade, Gadzoox, McDATA, and Vixel.

Agreement is not always a walk in the park. The five competitors--all jockeying for market share--are participating in a neutral activity. Under the auspices of OSFI, competitors are collaborating to agree upon the appropriate pieces of the standards that address switch-to-switch interoperability and will present the results to the ANSI T11 group for ratification by year-end.

The benefit to the user is that fabric switches will interoperate, giving the user more choices and the assurance that, as their SANs expand, switches can be added that have the features that best meet specific application needs. The benefit to the participants is that they can design products today and be assured that their products comply with the standards well in advance of the standards being ratified.

Several software alliances have been formed to agree upon and define the operation of an application. Examples include the Legato Celestra Consortium and Tivoli's Partner Program (see Fig.).

Legato's Celestra Consortium was formed to promote an open, integrated architecture for the effective movement and management of data within SAN environments. Legato's Celestra introduced an open, distributed architecture that optimizes data movement efficiency by using the open standard SCSI Extended Copy specification. Data movement intelligence, located in intelligent SAN devices using Legato Celestra agents, enables powerful applications such as serverless, out-board backup.

Tivoli's take is that enterprise SAN management is much more than a set of tools where each tool supports a different device located on the SAN infrastructure. Enterprise SAN management is the interoperability of individual device management applications into a common, central management framework that provides a common interface in support of LANs, WANs, as Well as SANs. Their partner program is designed to influence individual device manufacturers towards implementation of the necessary hooks to make this enterprise SAN management vision possible through Tivoli's central framework.

Lastly, there are organizations that promote the use of a specific set of standards such as the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), which promotes the use of the Fibre Channel standards. The FCIA is the joining of two organizations, the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) and Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC), which were originally formed to promote different segments of the Fibre Channel industry.

Richard Lyford is the senior product marketing manager of McDATA Corp. (Broomfield, CO).