Standards and other fairy tales. (Storage as I See It).

I made a speech last month to a group of storage end users in San Jose. After the presentation I had lunch with a couple of them. They were almost teary eyed as they asked when real standards would come to storage.

I wanted more than anything to reassure these folks that standards and interoperability were well on their way. But I couldn't. What I told them was that in spite of claims to openness and commitment to standards, true standardization has been sacrificed on the altar of product differentiation. To many of the companies that claim to be working for standards, the real effort is to make their own implementation a standard.

IT history is filled with examples of de facto standards. Some standards have come into being because a company was first to market with a product. "De facto standard" is just another way of saying "proprietary." To be fair, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Businesses need to recoup R&D investments, and being the foundation of a de facto standard is almost a guaranteed way to make money.

But it is not what the customers are asking for. It is a genuine paradox, I think. The storage industry is listening to its customers better than at any time in history, but a deaf ear is turned to standards pleas, and standards avoidance is the rule rather than the exception. The problem is actually IT wide. Look at the IP space as an exemplar. You cannot yet plug Cisco into Foundry.

Apologists might point to the plethora of committees dedicated to standardization, including ANSI, EGMA, ISO, and many others. They might also point to the evolving role of the Storage Networking Industry Association, whose forum activity seems to be evolving into a standards activity. Finally, they might point to the various plugfests and demonstrations common to conferences and trade events.

But look at the makeup of these committees. How many of them are subservient to the vendor community for everything from funding to participation. The committees are not an altruistic effort. In the days of the RAID Advisory Board, I could point at representatives of large corporations who were sent specifically to slow down and delay standards efforts. This was done in order for that corporation to get its technology act together and take it on the road. Too often, standards committees are all about competitive advantage.

I was speaking about plugfests to an executive who asked not to be identified. He suggested to me that plugfests were. able' to inject a false confidence by having a plugfest version of a product...a version not necessarily available to the customer. This may or may not be true, and should not be taken as fu-m fact. But if such a thing takes place, the temporary delay it buys for vendors will not hold back the ocean of requests for return that would inevitably wash over the product.

Now that I have railed against the vendor community for insincerity, it is necessary to point out that my teary-eyed end users could be playing a game or two of their own. One very bright market analyst pointed out that some users may well call for standards in an effort to obtain feature-rich products for which they do not wish to pay. In the continuing effort to get the lowest price, users pressure the vendor community to load as many standard features as possible.

A lack of standards also provides a handy excuse for not spending money on upgrades. How many users have turned salesmen away, saying: "I won't do that until it is a standard"?

I suppose that little reconciliation is in sight. Will users call for standards to a point that they will accept the least common denominator versus the best of breed? There has always been a very practical justification for proprietary implementations of products, platforms, and technologies. The proprietary solutions work. In the meantime, both sides will weave a charming story about standards. But I continue to have doubts.