Supported Solutions Forum Accepts Two Milestone Offerings Tailored to Simplify SAN Management in a Highly Available SAN
SANTA CLARA, California, January 24, 2002 — Storage networking leaders Hitachi Data Systems, IBM Corporation, INRANGE Technologies Corporation, StorageTek, and VERITAS Software Corporation today announced the completion of interoperability testing on two jointly-developed Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions designed to streamline storage management and offer multiple options for protecting and enhancing data availability.
The open SAN solutions, the second major interoperability initiative registered under the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Supported Solutions Forum (SSF) since inception of its new submission and registration guidelines, consist of multivendor disk storage, multivendor tape storage and multivendor backup/restore software, all connected through a highly scalable networking fabric.
Design highlights of this SAN solution include:
Cooperatively supported by each company, the new solutions also formally satisfy the Supported Solutions Forum's (SSF) criteria of being a 'Competitive Solution Set', as they contain competing disk storage and competing tape storage. The solutions also represent a 'Companion Solution Set', as the two solutions offer the choice of vendor tape backup/restore software as differentiators.
"This is the type of interaction that has been sorely lacking in the industry — players getting together to solve real customer problems," said Steve DuPlessie, Founder and Senior Analyst of The Enterprise Storage Group. "This is what will accelerate overall market demand."
By enabling customers to implement SANs that have been tested for concurrent interoperability of disk, tape, and backup solutions from multiple vendors and that support resource configuration within the same data zones, the new solutions can be expected to help reduce complexity and lower storage costs. Users will be able to consolidate storage islands and manage them with less effort, while also protecting previous technology investments.
"As data volumes explode and storage networks continue to increase in size and functionality, customers are demanding storage solutions that enable interoperability of heterogeneous storage systems, with the ability to provide application servers with storage capacity as needed," said Marc Oswald, Chairman of the SSF. "Today's announcement is evidence of storage vendors working together at both a business and technology level, for the good of the customer to provide interoperable multi-vendor storage networking options that have high value and solve real world business problems."
"Our success is measured in part on how well we can support and recreate computing environments," said John Lindeman, Director of Operations at SunGard, a leading developer of high availability infrastructures for business continuity. "When storage industry vendors cooperate at this level to drive interoperability among their respective systems and establish standard implementations, it enhances our business by creating much more flexibility to meet customer needs."
Customers expected to adopt these new solutions include those who require scalable, highly available, cascaded INRANGE directors for their networking fabric; those that want to aggregate enterprise disk storage from both IBM and HDS while using VERITAS Volume Manager™ with Dynamic Multipathing (DMP) software for failover and load balancing; those that want to aggregate tape storage from both IBM and StorageTek; and those that want solid LAN-free backup solutions from either IBM Tivoli or VERITAS Software.
For more information about the open SAN solutions announced please refer to www.snia.org/ssf.
Hitachi Data Systems is a leading supplier of storage hardware, software, solutions and services. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), Japan's largest electronics company, HDS is committed to providing the technological infrastructure for the world's most information-intensive corporations. With 2,600 employees, Hitachi Data Systems does business in the public and private sectors in 170 countries and regions on six continents, including the rapidly emerging economies in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies, and all of the major Storage Service Providers (SSPs). For more information, please visit the HDS Web site at www.hds.com.
IBM is the world leader in storage systems, software, services and technology. IBM led all companies once again with over 400 storage patents in 2000. IBM's open storage solutions are designed for the rigors of e-business collaboration utilizing next generation concepts for open storage by integrating modular technologies including disk, tape and optical storage media, powerful processors, and rich software. For more information on the Enterprise Storage Server and its performance advantages over competing products, visit www.storage.ibm.com.
Tivoli Software from IBM can help enable an IT organization to reduce the total cost of ownership and improve service levels of the IT infrastructure. Tivoli systems management software helps traditional enterprises and e-businesses worldwide manage security, storage, performance and availability, and configuration and operations. Backed by world-class IBM services, support and research, Tivoli software is one of four key IBM Software Group brands — DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and WebSphere. For more information, visit www.tivoli.com.
INRANGE Technologies Corporation (Nasdaq: INRG) provides large-scale, mission critical storage networking products, software and services — the IN-VSN offering — which support "end-to-end, any distance — anywhere" solutions. These solutions include a unique family of switches, HBAs, directors, storage over WAN and optical networking products that allow storage networks to extend beyond traditional geographic boundaries. Through the combination of the IN-VSN family of products with the INRANGE Global Consulting offerings of consulting and professional services, INRANGE creates solutions for customers' complex business problems and storage networking applications. INRANGE has a 33-year history of providing mission-critical networking technologies, servicing over 2,200 customers in 90 countries. For more information, visit www.inrange.com.
StorageTek (NYSE:STK), a $2 billion worldwide company with headquarters in Louisville, Colo., delivers a broad range of storage solutions for digitized data. StorageTek solutions are easy to manage and allow universal access to data across servers, media types and storage networks. StorageTek is the innovator and global leader in virtual storage solutions for tape automation, disk storage systems and storage networking and is a voting member of the SNIA. Because of StorageTek, customers can manage and leverage their digital assets as their businesses grow and can maximize IT productivity to ensure enterprise-class business continuity. For more information, see www.storagetek.com, or call (800) 786-7835.
VERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq: VRTS) provides essential storage software solutions that enable customers to protect and access their business-critical data. The company's corporate headquarters is located at 350 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043. (650) 527-8000, fax: (650) 527-8050, email: vx-sales@veritas.com, Web site: http://www.veritas.com/.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit organization, made up of over 300 companies and individuals worldwide spanning the entire storage industry. SNIA members share a common goal: to set the pace of the industry by ensuring that storage networks become efficient, complete and trusted solutions across the IT community. To this end the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For information, contact the SNIA at (650) 949-6720 or via email at executivedirector@snia.org, or visit the SNIA Web site at www.snia.org.
The Supported Solutions Forum (SSF) is a group of companies within the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) that promotes customer adoption of open storage networking solutions by encouraging vendors to work together and deliver to customers mutually supported, interoperable solutions. In support of the SNIA goals, the highly innovative SSF was established in June of 2001, so that SNIA members could improve storage networking interoperability through solutions jointly developed and qualified by Forum members. Each Supported Solution is cooperatively supported by sponsoring Forum members to provide a streamlined customer support process for the end-user company. Visit the SSF Web site at www.snia.org/ssf.
Contacts: PR
Jodi Reinman, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970.1050, jodi.reinman@hds.com
Alan Kaiser, IBM, (914) 766-3823, akaiser@us.ibm.com
Andrea Strahan, Tivoli Software, (409) 741-8706, astrahan@us.ibm.com
Lou Martelli, INRANGE Technologies, (609) 518-4179, lou.martelli@inrange.com
Jason Knadler, StorageTek, (303) 673-5520, jason_knadler@storagetek.com
Jeremy Roe, VERITAS Software, (650) 527-3010, jeremy.roe@veritas.com
Max Shu, SNIA Marketing Manager, (719) 884-8903, marketingmanager@snia.org
Carol Lusk, SNIA SSF Marketing Manager, (770) 205-1722, ssfmarketing@snia.org
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