NEWS BRIEFS
Hopkinton, MASS. — The FibreAlliance, an open, international consortium driving the development and implementation of standards for managing heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs), added six Fibre Channel suppliers to its membership. This brings to 50 the number of companies working cooperatively within the FibreAlliance to make it easier and more cost-effective for customers to design, deploy and operate SANs.
The new FibreAlliance members include:
Adaptec, Inc., of Milpitas, Calif., ( http://www.adaptec.com ) makes products and solutions that move, transfer, manage and protect valuable data that is the heart of Internet and e-business computing.
ArtStor AG, of Hamburg, Germany, ( http://www.artstor.de ) specializes in highly available, platform-independent storage hardware and software solutions as well as individually tailored integration and performance-tuning services.
Connex, of San Jose, Calif., ( http://www.connex.com ) specializes in providing scalable, centrally managed network storage solutions that deliver coordinated intelligence to storage-centric environments, from the workgroup to the enterprise.
Nexsan Technologies, Ltd., of Derby, England, ( http://www.nexsan.com ) is an OEM design and manufacturing company specializing in advanced, Internet-enabled, data storage technologies.
ProactiveNet, Inc., of Alviso, Calif., ( http://www.proactivenet.com ) enables online businesses to optimize their site performance proactively by providing insight into the business impact of the e-business infrastructure’s performance.
Spectra Logic Corporation, of Boulder, Col., ( http://www.spectralogic.com ) is a leading manufacturer of high-performance tape automation products providing mission-critical data protection for companies worldwide.
“SANs provide an effective way to profitably harness the exploding and often far-flung volumes of information companies need to manage, protect and share,” said Don Swatik, Vice President of Strategic Planning at EMC Corporation, which sponsors the FibreAlliance. “But the full promise of SANs awaits standardized methods for managing SANs in a multivendor environment. Working together, the companies of the FibreAlliance are playing a central role in making these standards a reality.”
The work of the FibreAlliance has resulted in an engineering specification for building interoperable SAN management capabilities based on a management information base, or MIB. A MIB is a group of parameters, or variables, whose values define and describe the status of a network and its components. The MIB enables users to collect and display SAN device information and launch each device’s management tools, such as configuration and control utilities. This capability provides a common method for managing multiple devices across a heterogeneous storage network. The MIB is the underlying technology for implementing a single, comprehensive storage management console from which storage administrators can quickly and easily monitor and manage the entire SAN topology.
The MIB is nearly complete. The FibreAlliance has submitted the results of its work to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the governing body authorized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for SNMP-based MIB standards. Currently, the MIB is proceeding through the review process of the IETF and can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.ietf.org or at http://www.fibrealliance.org .
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