Would your job be easier if standards actually standardised more than the basic things? Lately, there's been a lot of talk about the need for the storage and other vendors to have their devices work better together, as was the case in the networking market several years ago.
I just got off the phone to BMC VP and industry veteran Gene Austin. His speciality is distributed data management and he is a bit disparaging of the noises other vendors make about standards. For me, that BMC sees big ongoing profits in providing highly specialised heterogeneous management tools to more easily handle the differences in database vendors' platforms underscores the fact they don't see standardisation as being in their best interests. Compounding the management problem is the mix of the database platforms - including the big three Oracle, SQL, DB2, and Sybase as a distant fourth - that many sites have.
Meanwhile, vendors such as EMC, Quantum, StorageTek and Compaq agree that storage area networks (SAN) standards are needed in order to ease your management burden, but they can't agree on how and when. Proposed standards include the Common Information Model (CIM) that would let manufacturers integrate their devices to allow sharing of management information.
The problem is one of motivation. While vendors may talk of the value of open standards (and they are clearly of benefit to you), as technology suppliers they also equate standards to lack of differentiation, commoditised products and squeezed margins - just like in the PC industry.
Stuck on storage? E-mails to: David_Beynon@idg.com.au.