InformationWeek

One hot topic was the pending architecture war among Fibre Channel, the IP network, and the Infiniband standard--Intel's push for the next-generation system bus architecture. The bet is that a combination of Fibre Channel and IP architectures will dominate, with Fibre Channel as the more-costly but faster choice.

Businesses that have just started investing in storage area networks based on Fibre Channel will benefit in the short term, says Gartner Group analyst Nick Allen, because the other standards are at least three years away. John Monroe, another Gartner Group analyst, predicts that the requirement for E-business data to exist online, along with lower prices for disk storage, will finally make tape storage obsolete in a few years, for all except the deepest archiving needs.

The need for storage management standards also drew strong reactions. EMC Corp.'s engineering program manager Lou Przystas defended his company's Fiber Alliance as an organization with numerous vendor partners trying to set management standards as quickly as possible. "We've already created a de facto standard for Simple Network Management Protocol connectivity," he says, "and we've submitted it to [the Storage Networking Industry Association]," the primary association for storage network-management standards.

But three other vendors weren't optimistic about storage standards being set any time soon. Ron Riffe, a strategic planner at IBM's Tivoli Systems division, says the vendor will "meld some base standards into its products" before the fourth quarter. Riffe adds that IBM is trying to make sure storage-management functionality won't be too tightly integrated with Tivoli's enterprise-management framework, and create a lock-in problem for users.

Steve Harriman, a storage VP of marketing at Computer Associates, says his company will continue to work with EMC on Fiber Alliance--but he doesn't expect broad conformance for at least two years. "A lot more has to happen with a broad set of disciplines and standards," he says. "But we'll support the standards when they're available."

Charlie Kamkowski, a storage marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard, says HP's storage platform is built to take advantage of standards as they emerge. "But that will take at least a year," he says. "I'm not as optimistic about the ability of standards bodies to work quickly."