Mr Zisman praised the efforts of the Storage Networking Industry Association for its foresight in developing standards to promote interoperability, but called on vendors to embrace standards that will speed adoption of new technologies by enabling customers to ultimately separate decisions of managing storage from the devices itself.

He explained that virtualization offers users the dual benefits of improved business continuity and efficiency. With improved business continuity, users can increase application availability, reduce planned downtime and outages as well as provide consistency and improve the efficiency of backup and recovery operations. Virtualization can help improve business efficiency by providing flexibility and efficiency in managing storage growth, improving data access, sharing, resource utilization and costs as well as allowing easier, quicker application and server deployment. In addition, it can help protect existing IT investments, reduces the impact of obsolescence and supports further improvements in functionality over time.

"As data continues to grow exponentially on complex heterogeneous Storage Area Networks (SANs), customers are faced with the dual challenges of managing both their storage costs and the availability of data," said Zisman. "Today, storage virtualization stands on the threshold of maturing as a viable commercial solution to simplify the storage infrastructure and provide these significant benefits to customers. However, for customers to realize these benefits, the storage industry needs to work together to deliver robust, scalable and interoperable virtualization solutions."

Zisman detailed the pivotal technologies and industry initiatives required to deliver interoperable solutions:

1) Contribute and collaborate to develop open standards
2) Support, adopt and adhere to open standards and interfaces
3) Support for seamless integration at all levels of storage
4) Test and support interoperability across vendors and platforms
5) Work together so that users receive adequate end-to-end support

"The Storage Industry is moving past the 'tipping point' of shifting to open standards," Zisman concluded, "and for customers to realize real the benefits, storage products need to be interoperable and manageable across vendors and platforms. The development of new virtualization and storage management technologies is an opportunity for storage vendors to accelerate next stage of SAN evolution and deliver value to customers."