The Day The Customer Came First.

Every month, I look at some aspect of the mass storage industry. It is the most competitive industry that you could ever imagine. Many of the companies are like professional beauties in a beauty pageant, with figurative knives in each other's back. There are winners and there are losers. Too often, the virtual combat of business competition forgets that it is the customer... the user who will determine who really wins.

Well, recently it was the customer that won. It is true that the most successful businesses are the ones that listen most actively to their customers, but when they listen to the extent that cooperation between industry competitors cooperate...that's a real win for the user.

The winning event took place when storage industry leaders Brocade Communications, Compaq Computer, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and McDATA announced a group of cooperative acts intended to provide storage product customers with the first qualified cross-vendor, interoperable storage networking solutions. The initiatives came from one of the many Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) forums: the Supported Solutions Forum.

The six companies have:

* Completed joint qualification of two open storage area network (SAN) solutions that enable the coexistence of data zones containing Compaq, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and IBM storage system products on a single, shared Fibre Channel fabric.

* The four storage system vendors have signed bilateral cooperative support agreements intended to simplify joint customer support in multivendor environments.

Open SAN solutions are much like the weather; lots of people talk about them but few do anything about them. Too frequently, the 'open' standard is a thinly veiled proprietary effort. "Sure we support open standards, so long as our product is in the heart of the subsystem." But the efforts of the SSF don't follow the same tired pattern. The standards-based storage networks seem to provide tested interoperability of products supplied by multiple vendors. Intended benefits can include increased flexibility for networked storage infrastructures, reduced costs from consolidating SAN islands, greater investment protection, and maximized value of storage networking technology. Storage networking customers are now able to deploy heterogeneous SANs from multiple suppliers with interoperability and improved support. Who knows.. perhaps this is the beginning of true fabric interoperability?

Genuine multi-vendor cooperation...what a concept. Four storage system vendors and two major switch vendors. It's a creditable start that deserves enthusiastic support; other SNIA members should be quick to jump on the bandwagon. Ever since the Fibre Channel vendors missed the boat on e-port to e-port interoperability, this kind of cooperation has been screamed for by customers and historically received a deaf ear. (Incidentally, SNIA members do not hold a patent on vendor cooperation. Non-members could work on customer-centric cooperation, too.)

Let me quote verbatim from a prepared statement from the SSF: "The open SAN solutions qualified by the six companies consists of 128-port Fibre Channel fabrics that allow a variety of server platforms to access data residing on Compaq Storage Works, EMC Enterprise Storage, Hitachi Data Systems Freedom Storage, and IBM Enterprise Storage Server. One solution uses Brocade SilkWorm Fabric Switches and the other uses McDATA ED-5000 Directors. Each storage system and its associated servers are logically partitioned into a vendor-specific data zone. The Fibre Channel fabric is shared by all four data zones."

This is exciting and bodes well for the participants. But the other half of the announcement really caught my eye. How many IT managers are weary beyond expression with the finger-pointing common in customer support scenarios? Service calls turn into a demoralizing litany of declarations that the problem is someone else's fault.

The SFF bilateral cooperative support agreements are intended to provide procedures for handling customer service calls expeditiously in a multi-vendor environment. Customers will receive support in accordance with their existing support agreements with individual vendors. But under the new cooperative support agreements, vendors will be able to contact each other and share information to streamline the troubleshooting of issues arising in multi-vendor storage environments.

An end to finger-pointing and buck-passing would be a customer benefit heretofore only dreamed of. Let me point the finger at these six companies, though, as taking a laudable step forward in consideration of the customer. In looking into this initiative, I learned that one or two other major system firms abstained from closing ranks on this issue. It strongly suggests that being customer-centric isn't for everybody.