Despite the best efforts of an industry forum dedicated to defining interoperability specs, the goal is elusive and largely unrealized. Still, pragmatism is the byword as enterprises in different industry sectors come to grips with strategic objectives and technical requirements. IT buyers of storage are less interested in uniformity across their enterprise than they are in retaining options for growth and management. Consider the cases of three different enterprises and how they addressed a broad variety of storage requirements. Engle said GCIB uses Sun, HP, Network Appliance, and Compaq for servers, with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase databases.
Data is spread out across all of the platforms.
Some GCIB locations running Oracle may have about 300 gigabytes, though some report they'll need 3 terabytes. Storage is also a place where technical and business considerations collide. GCIB uses NAS and SANs depending on the operating system, department, and portion of the network in question. With all the storage solutions up to this point, you're talking about some CPU and a boatload of storage behind it. He projects that GCIB's server costs will decrease because of that consolidation.