SAN giants look into mirror standard

Six storage area network hardware vendors have committed to an interoperability standard for data mirroring, to help with business continuity projects.

Hitachi Data Systems, Inrange, IBM, Legato Systems, StorageTek and Veritas have all promised to make their SAN products compliant with an open specification.

The solution is the first to be registered with the Supported Solutions Forum (SSF), an initiative of the industry standards body, the Storage Area Networking Association (SNIA). The companies said the solution meets the requirements of the SSF for competing disk storage, tape storage and tape backup/restore software in the one solution, to give users a choice of suppliers.

The competing disk solutions are IBM's Enterprise Storage Server and HDS's Freedom range. Tape hardware included in the specification includes IBM's 3590E drives, plus StorageTek's L700 library with 9840 and 9940 tape drives.