Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

FCIA ANNOUNCES SANmark SCD-4001 TEST SUITE AVAILABILITY

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) has announced the availability of the SANmark Conformance Document (SCD), SCD-4001 v1, for end device discovery and management. Following several earlier SCD test suites, the SCD-4001 conformance test suite defines tests to ensure that Fibre Channel end devices are discoverable and manageable by a wide range of storage area network (SAN) management applications. It tests the discovery and management support requirements for end devices supporting Fibre Channel-Methodologies for Interconnects (FC-MI). Under the criteria set forth in the SCD-4001, Fibre Channel device vendors will be able to qualify their products for the SANmark trademark.

The SCD-4001 was verified through testing the SCD-4001 test suite within the FCIA-sponsored small group test periods (SGTP). In these SGTP test sessions, industry peers test their devices against the test suite, progressing towards final verification of the test suite and the SCD for which it was written.

David Allen, Sr. Product Manager, LSI Logic and chair of the SANmark Qualified Program group, stated, "The SCD-4001 conformance test suite is the latest addition to the SANmark Qualified Program test suites with which Fibre Channel device vendors qualify their products to use the SANmark trademark. Qualification for the SANmark trademark benefits the entire storage networking industry. It is provided by the FCIA to ensure that Fibre Channel products meet standards conformance and ease system integration efforts."

SANmark Qualified Program

The FCIA established the SANmark Qualified Program to provide the networking storage industry with an objective indication of how Fibre Channel products perform against reasonable standards through the use of published conformance test suites, as well as to promote SANmark-qualified products using the SANmark trademark. The SANmark Qualified Program is a comprehensive set of Fibre Channel storage networking conformance test suites. Vendors, whose end devices pass these tests, ensure robust, consistent heterogeneous SAN behavior, thereby promoting reduced time to market, investment protection, and the satisfaction of customer needs.

For more information on SCD-4001, a list of test vendors providing platforms for executing SANmark-qualified test suites, a list of SANmark-qualified products and general information about the SANmark Qualified Program, please visit www.sanmark.org.

About SANmark

The SANmark Qualified Program is sponsored, operated, and promoted as an open industry conformance test suite development program within the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). This program addresses product interoperability and device-level compatibility for companies participating in the program. The program is open to members and nonmembers of the FCIA organization and is intended to benefit the entire storage networking industry at large. More information about SANmark and the FCIA is available at the SANmark Web site at www.sanmark.org.

About the FCIA

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a nonprofit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators, developers, systems vendors, industry professionals, and end users. With more than 190 members and affiliates in the United States, Europe and Japan, the FCIA is committed to delivering a broad base of Fibre Channel infrastructure to support a wide array of industry applications within the mass storage and IT-based arenas. FCIA working groups focus on specific aspects of the technology, targeting both vertical and horizontal markets including storage, video, networking and SAN management. For more information on the FCIA, please visit the Web site at www.fibrechannel.org or call us at 415-561-6370.