Using SNIA resources to evaluate SAN performance
By Tom Clark
Evaluating SAN solutions can be a painful process for customers who lack the space, equipment and technical resources to stage a proof of concept configuration. Understandably, customers are often hesitant to rely exclusively on vendor test labs and personnel. Typically, once the evaluation is complete the vendor will be expecting a signed purchase order. In addition, a customer may want to stage a multi-vendor SAN solution with an array of products not fully qualified by a particular vendor.
Ideally, the customer would be able to evaluate SAN applications without vendor pressure and with access to a wide variety of products. To promote the adoption of storage networking technology, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has created a facility for vendor-neutral proof of concept, interoperability and performance testing at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs, CO. Available on a per day, per week or monthly contract, lab areas can be used to stage large and small networked storage test beds for a wide variety of storage applications.
The SNIA Technology Center will be announcing initial customer contracts for facilities usage shortly and is continuing to equip the lab areas with state of the art SAN and NAS equipment. For more information, contact the SNIA Technology Center Director, Tom Conroy, at mailto:tcd@snia.org.
About the author: Tom Clark (tclark@nishansystems.com) is director of Technical Marketing at Nishan Systems, Inc., the vendor of Storage over IP SAN solutions. Tom is a board member of the Storage Networking Industry
Association (SNIA) and co-chair of the SNIA Interoperability Committee. He has published numerous articles and white papers on storage networking and is the author of Designing Storage Area Networks. A new book, IP SANs, a Guide to iSCSI, iFCP and FCIP Protocols for Storage Area Networks will be published this fall.
