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Storage Vendors' Wild West Mentality. . .

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May 5, 2003 (Computerworld) -- . . . is working against users' interests when it comes to interoperability standards, rails Jon William Toigo, consultant, author, columnist and, starting tomorrow, founder and acting chairman of the Data Management Institute (DMI). Efforts by groups like the Storage Networking Industry Association to create workable standards are hampered by vendors constantly taking potshots at each other for competitive advantage, which is why the DMI is needed, he argues. Toigo says his group won't accept vendors as members, "although if they want to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a white paper, I don't care." The DMI will also evaluate vendor interoperability claims by testing their gear inside user data centers, then publish the results, Toigo says. He believes those published results will likely bring on vendor lawsuits, which is why he has located he DMI in his hometown of Dunedin, Fla. Florida, he says, has an antinuisance-lawsuit statute, which should shield him from vendors' lawyers. The commute isn't so bad, either.

Tony Barbagallo, VP of worldwide marketing for backup software provider Dantz Development Corp. in Orinda, Calif., agrees that the DMI confronts "a huge issue in storage resource management." But he thinks its charter won't affect his end of the storage industry, where operating system monopolies—uh, that is, OS standards—matter most. "We follow the APIs," he says. That's why tomorrow the company will release Dantz Retrospect 6.5 for Microsoft Windows. The upgrade backs up files faster because it streams multiple backup sessions to multiple tapes simultaneously. It's designed to back up Microsoft Exchange at the mailbox level and to be fully compatible with the .Net functions in Windows Server 2003.

Speaking of .Net brings to mind Web services and how they're catching on—albeit, in small ways first with more complex services coming in time. That's the strategy of Wayne Aiello, VP of e-business services at Corporate Express Inc. The Broomfield, Colo., office products company handles about 30,000 online orders per day. While individual orders are pretty small, only about $150, they add up to more than $1 billion a year for the company. Aiello doesn't think EDI is "less capable than XML," but all the B2B action between Corporate Express and its customers is in emerging Web services. Initially, Corporate Express leaned on its integrator, The Ultimate Software Consultants in Lombard, Ill., to set up XML-based data exchanges between its Oracle back-end systems and the 25 different customer applications. Now, after some intensive training, Aiello's team is integrating eight to 10 companies per month on its own. The next phase for Corporate Express will include SOAP interactions that will enable customers to generate purchase orders from their systems based on data coming from Corporate Express.

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