Cisco looks to SNIA for SAN standards support
Cisco looks to SNIA for SAN standards support
Confidence in the storage market is extremely reliant on the evolution of standards in the industry, so Cisco's news of its Virtual SAN technology receiving recognition by an American standards body is good news for users of its technology.
However, it's the recognition of SNIA which carries the most weight internationally, despite the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards selecting Cisco's VSAN for approval by the American National Standard Institute as the industry standard for deploying Virtual Fabrics.
Virtual Fabrics is defined as having the ability to segment a single, physical storage area network fabric into many logical and completely independent SANs.
Tom Edsall, the vice president and general manager of the storage and switching technologies group at Cisco Systems said: "We consider the standardisation of VSAN technology to be a significant accomplishment, paralleling Cisco's pioneering efforts in the development of Virtual LAN technology as a data networking industry standard.
"Just as the standardisation of VLANs forever altered the landscape of data networks for the better, we expect the storage networking industry to now widely adopt VSANs to help storage administrators to build more scalable, reliable and efficient SANs."
Greg Bartlett, the director of systems engineering at Electronic Arts, a world leading interactive entertainment software company, talked about how VSANs has helped his organisation.
"The key technology that helped us move to a consolidated SAN approach was VSANs, which allow us to build a large SAN that can be logically partitioned into small SANs to suit the storage requirements of different applications.
"This approach and the vastly improving scalability it provides, will helps us better adapt to our rapidly growing storage needs across our entire company."
Once SNIA recognises the VSAN technology as the industry standard too for deployment, companies in Australia and the rest of the world will sit up and listen with even greater confidence.
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