NEWS BRIEFS
Dallas, TEXAS — In preparation for what the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) leaders called their most comprehensive interoperability demonstration yet, volunteers from more than forty storage networking vendors gathered in Dallas last week for three days of final testing.
The pre-staging event was the culmination of months worth of planning and was designed to give the participants one last chance to configure, test, and tweak the live hardware and software demos that will be one of the featured events at the Fall 2000 Storage Networking World (SNW) Conference and Expo this October 30 – November 1 at the Renaissance Orlando Resort. Storage Networking World, an alliance between the SNIA and Computerworld, promotes access to the latest information on storage solutions for users, implementers and vendors.
SNIA Interoperability Committee co-chairs Tom Clark of Vixel Corporation and Sheila Childs of Storage Provider said the SNW Interoperability Demo will be the culmination of months worth of work by volunteers representing every segment of the storage networking industry.
“Though only one of several ongoing projects, the SNW demo is obviously the Interoperability Committee’s most visible initiative,” said Clark. “It is an excellent opportunity to both advance the state of the art in storage networking and to showcase proven applications that solve real problems for IT users today.”
“We wanted this event to feature a good mix of previews of emerging SNIA standards in key technology areas, live demonstrations of market-ready storage networking applications, and opportunities for some hands-on access to state-of-the-art solutions,” said Childs. “Our focus from the beginning was on showing how storage networks can be used to solve today’s most pressing data management problems.”
There are seven sub-themes in the SNW Interoperability Demo:
— The New HBA API Standard: Emerging technology for enhanced usability and manageability in storage networks
— Storage Management: Advanced techniques for managing multivendor storage and networks
— Storage Networks for Everyone: Certified multivendor solutions from the small department to the global enterprise
— Storage over the WAN: Extending the advantages of storage networks through the convergence of campus, metropolitan and wide area networks
— The SSP/ASP Solution: The `data storage as utility’ vision and some of the applications that are making it reality
— Extended Copy: Foundation for serverless backup
— Storage Network Playground: Hands-on learning opportunities.
“This will easily be the most impressive demonstration of storage systems interoperability ever,” said Larry Krantz, chairman of the board of directors of the SNIA. “It is a great example of how the SNIA member companies are striving together to encourage wider adoption and further the development of storage networking standards. These companies and the many volunteers are to be commended for their outstanding efforts.”
The Storage Networking World Conference & Expo is co-owned and produced by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). The latest conference program information is available online at http://www.computerworld.com/snw .
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