NetApp - Standards Watch

Microsoft announces Windows Server Logo Support for FCoE

Last week, Microsoft announced their intention to create a Windows Server Logo Program for FCoE adapters and storage systems – see Microsoft’s March 10 Windows Logo Program newsletter.  The logo kit is scheduled for preview availability in December 2009, with a release date of June 2010.

Although it was a pretty low-key announcement, with little media pickup (apart from Stephen Foskett in Gestalt IT), this is a big deal for FCoE. 

Within the FCoE standards development community, the lack of Microsoft support was seen as an impediment to broad adoption – and not just because Windows is high on the list of must-have OS support for data center solutions.  The Windows Server logo program has earned the well-deserved reputation for rapidly driving host and storage interoperability for emerging technologies. and accelerating end user deployment in production environments.  The industry’s experience with iSCSI is certainly a testament to this.

However, I don’t believe the impact of Windows Logo support on FCoE will be as dramatic as it was in the case of iSCSI.  For iSCSI, it was the combination of a high-quality iSCSI software initiator for Windows, a well-executed Logo program, and a huge Windows installed base of direct-attached storage looking to transition to networked storage, that drove iSCSI into the mainstream.

In the case of FCoE, no software initiator was been announced, and the installed base available for transition consists of (mostly Unix-based) Fibre Channel SAN installations looking to transition to a unified Data center fabric based on 10Gb Ethernet.  For Microsoft, logo support for FCoE probably represents a good opportunity to convert some of those Unix installations to Windows Server. 

INCITS Resolves Open Standards Development Controversy

Notable Standards News of 2008 - Part 3 of 3

Last May, I blogged about a controversy raging in INCITS over a rules change on specification access which would have made collaboration with other standards bodies practically impossible by making access only available after the standard had been completed.  The controversy pitted the INCITS Executive Board against the entire membership of the T10 and T11 technical committees, and opened up the specter of SCSI and Fibre Channel standards development looking for a home outside of INCITS.

Fortunately, for all involved a compromise was reached by the end of the year, which makes spec access possible for collaboration during the development process. The new policy and guidelines document is available at
http://www.incits/org/rd1/INCITS_RD1.pdf.

 In my view, credit for this should go to the T10 and T11 members, and particularly to their chairmen, particularly the late Bob Snively, who put in an enormous amount of effort to explain the issues to the EB, seek a compromise, and take on a bunch of extra administrative overhead to ensure the continuation of an effective open standards development process.

Bob gets my ”unsung hero of 2008” award.