IBM welcomes all SCSI devices to the SAN

IBM enhanced its Storage Area Network (SAN) Virtualisation software on Tuesday to allow the pooling of any storage products that support the SCSI standard, which includes products developed by rivals EMC, HP and Hitachi.

Last month, rumours emerged in the analyst community that IBM would be updating its SAN software to support EMC's product range but details were sketchy.

IBM has been steadily building up the capabilities of its storage solutions in an attempt to create a single virtual storage environment that allows large organisations to control their various pools of stored data without having to worry about the make of hardware or software used.

Rich Lechner, vice president of IBM's storage division, said that although SANs were originally designed to allow an enterprise to virtually pool all of its storage systems from a single point, the task has been difficult because companies tended to deploy storage technologies on a local or departmental level and rarely used single-vendor systems. This latest enhancement, said Lechner, goes some way to solving the problems associated with non-heterogeneous environments.

"Based on open standards, our technology will allow us to virtualise the environment no matter whose storage infrastructure is there. So long as the system supports the SCSI standard -- and every vendor out there does -- we can virtualise it," Lechner said.

IBM's TotalStorage SAN File System Version 2.1 will be available from 29 June and includes support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 3.0 and Solaris 9.