The state of interoperability in the storage world is quite horrendous. Vendors don't keep track of products being released by each other to insure interop. Instead they wait for their customers to start requesting a specific configuration en masse before they begin testing. Interop testing in the storage world is also a lot more expensive than in the software world as it involves a ton of hardware. EMC's interop lab is the size of two football fields and has enough fibre cabling to wrap around the world a few times. Would the vendors pay for a lab like this to be outsourced?
SNIA has tried their hand at the interop lab, but has met with little success. What is needed is a user driven approach to storage interop. A service that will test specific configurations based on defined requirements. Would a business pay $1mm a year to confirm new deployments and technologies changes are compatible with their current environment if they spend $10mm a year on storage? What do you think?
