Goal is to make enterprise storage facilities interoperable and widely available

Compaq Computer, after its landmark deal with IBM, is working to forge similar alliances with other storage-system makers to make the patchwork of data facilities run by enterprises worldwide interoperable and widely available.

Mark Lewis, vice-president of Compaq's enterprise storage software business, said making these storage area networks (SANs) open and ubiquitous was expected to revolutionise corporate use of data in much the same way computer networking had made their operations more efficient.

'Companies that don't get into SAN now are risking becoming non-competitive. We think it's that important for them. Their competitiveness could be affected in the same way as if they didn't have fax or access to the Internet,' Mr Lewis said.

SANs have been defined as high-speed networks that link different kinds of data-storage devices with associated data servers on behalf of a larger network of users.

SANs support disk-mirroring, back-up and restore, archiving and retrieval of data, data migration from one storage device to another and data-sharing among different servers in a network. They can incorporate subnetworks with network-attached storage systems.

To accelerate the acceptance by enterprises of open SAN systems, Compaq and IBM recently announced a strategic agreement to make each other's storage hardware and software technologies interoperable.