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SCMP Reporter

Lawrence Krantz, senior technologist at storage giant EMC, believes that his title of chairman emeritus within the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) can sometimes sound a bit lofty.

But he says that if someone has to hold that position in the non-profit group, it might as well be him.

'SNIA members share a common goal: to set the pace of the industry by ensuring that storage networks become efficient, complete and trusted solutions across the broader information technology [IT] community,' Mr Krantz said.

One of the guiding principles, he said, was to propel open storage networking standards.

Since 1997, Mr Krantz has taken on several positions within the SNIA.

In his first role as chief marketing officer, he was a key contributor to developing and implementing strategies that helped grow the association's membership.

His profile in the IT sector rose considerably when he served as chairman of SNIA's board of directors for a couple of terms, starting in 1999.

He was personally responsible for the worldwide expansion of the SNIA, which established regional forums in Europe and Japan.

The association has swiftly grown from about 100 members in 1999 to include more than 300 companies and individuals from the information storage industry.

'I guess they missed me,' he said, referring to SNIA colleagues who urged him to lead the association's Storage Management Forum and counsel the executive team on various industry initiatives.

Although he has taken a non-voting executive role in the association, Mr Krantz has continued to focus on the international picture.

At present, he is hard at work establishing regional affiliates in the mainland, Australia and throughout the Pacific Rim.

He said that information storage had shifted to an openly managed, shared resource that required a new infrastructure of management and security tools.

There were a lot of gaps in this infrastructure, but SNIA had responded to the industry's call 'for a fast and aggressive response to these issues', he said.

The association has worked to achieve its goals by forming and sponsoring technical work groups, building and maintaining a vendor-neutral technology centre in Colorado Springs, and promoting what Mr Krantz described as 'activities that expand the breadth and quality of the storage networking market'.

Last month, the SNIA produced the Asian leg of its biannual Storage Networking World Conference series in Hong Kong.

In the United States last year, the group convinced more than 40 storage networking companies to stage what it claimed was 'the world's largest storage networking interoperability demonstration'.

The interoperability and solutions demonstration is a regular highlight of the SNIA's world conference and provides attendees with various ways to build and manage a storage network.

SNIA members also demonstrated last year CIM-SAN-1, a storage area network (SAN) controlled through a single management backbone built on so-called Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based enterprise management technologies.

The CIM-SAN-1 demonstration introduced technologies based on the Bluefin specification, which was recently adopted by the SNIA as the initial development focus for the organisation's Storage Management Initiative (SMI).

Included in the Bluefin specification are security, locking, and discovery features for SAN management.

The SNIA is using Bluefin to develop a standard management interface to be adopted by storage vendors for use in their products.

Once the standard has been developed, the SNIA will work closely with end users on specific configurations to enable them to easily adopt and integrate the system into their existing networks.

Research firm International Data Corp recently forecast that the worldwide SAN market would be worth about US$10 billion this year, although the global economic downturn and reduced corporate IT spending might affect the final tally.

A typical SAN operates as a high-speed, special-purpose network that interconnects different kinds of data storage devices with associated data servers on behalf of a larger network of users in an enterprise.

Mr Krantz stressed that storage networking represented the next step of technological evolution for the networking and storage industries.

This area is familiar territory for him in his role at Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC, the world's largest supplier of enterprise storage network technologies.

He is responsible for developing EMC's long-term storage strategy, focusing on advances in enterprise storage area networks.

'As an active member of SNIA, EMC continues to play a major role in developing and promoting open storage networking solutions,' he said.

'EMC is one of the leading advocates for standardised methods of ensuring fully interoperable storage networks. It has a clear commitment to heterogeneous SANs, offering customers the flexibility and cost-effectiveness they expect.'

In October, EMC outlined its plans to provide developer partners and enterprise customers with tools to drive standards-compliant, open-storage management systems into operating networks worldwide.

EMC's hardware and software will be SMI-compliant starting this year.

'There is much work to be done, but the SNIA has been setting the pace for our industry,' Mr Krantz said.

'SNIA member-companies are striving together to encourage wider adoption, and to further the development, of storage networking standards. These companies and the many volunteers in the association are giving their best efforts.'



SNIA chief sets storage standard pace