Rounding third, coming home

Hear that whooshing sound? No, it isn't the sound of Houston Astro Jeff Kent swinging over San Francisco Giant Robb Nen’s slider for strike three, but rather Mario and Scott leaving the building. Don’t worry, though. This column isn't going away completely -- it will continue to exist online, written by Mario himself.

So rejoice or bemoan or whatever it is you do. But before we go, we'd like to take a few more swings at some vendors and throw a couple more curves of our own. Let's talk about what's going on with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and what happened at their show last week in the valley of the sun.

Seventeen SNIA participants demonstrated the working SMI (Storage Management Initiative -- formerly the Bluefin SAN management interface specification), and the final draft was released to the public for review. "Working" means the various third-party management software packages could actively manage the multi-vendor arrays. And "manage" means it can create volumes, do LUN masking and mapping, and do zoning configuration.

This may mean little to you right now, but it will matter soon. We'll explain: These competing vendors working together (both at the show and away from the show) signal true cooperation among vendors on this front. This cooperation should result in vendors feeling justified to open up their storage arrays just enough to allow third-party management products to manage multiple arrays. Through the same generic API, vendors will extend the object model to offer even better management for their own systems, which also helps you.

Now for a couple of parting cuts. Let's start with SNIA: We believe what they've touched so far has become gold. We see widespread adoption of SMI (CIM/WEBM) and iSCSI gradually replacing DAS in entry-level/mid-market servers (iSCSI received a big SNIA push, too). And we see more and more specialized storage solutions that will arrive optimized for specific applications, such as e-mail, Web servers, and application servers.

Meanwhile, on the so-called virtualization switches or platform front, we don't think array vendors are in any hurry to move their array-based proprietary software into a switch. Without the porting of their feature-rich software, we see these platforms struggling to gain acceptance. We don't see an immediate incentive to participate in virtualization and believe Sun's Pirus acquisition and its newly minted N1 Data Platform, will be a bigger flop in the storage arena than this year's Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Maybe in the datacenter or for Sun-only customers, it will succeed, but for mass storage crossover, not so much. Besides, there are already too many of these platforms for cash-strapped startups to write their software to -- instead, they'll balk.

Speaking of balks … we're taking the San Francisco Giants over the New York Yankees in seven in this year's World Series. And now, we’ve got to run -- Pac Bell Park is calling.