The new storage buzzword is 'interoperability', which comes as a relief to a technology area dominated for so long by proprietary infrastructures.

A series of big storage names last week proclaimed their intention of making their products work with those from other suppliers. Even operating system suppliers such as Novell and Microsoft have said they are looking into enterprise software management. This could result in a new approach to storage: instead of forever increasing disk space, we can expect products to tackle growing data volumes.

The big surprise is Microsoft's sudden interest in storage. It is less than three months since Bill Gates told Network News that he thought intelligent data archiving was not a problem because storage capacity was unlimited.

"That is just wrong," laughed Dave Norris, vice-president at storage management provider Princeton Softech. He said that people were not just buying more disks, but bigger machines at the same time. "That gets terribly expensive. More metal is not the way forward. The volume growth of data is terrifying. It is cluttering systems and slowing performance. Anyone who believes growth rates will reduce is very optimistic. It's more likely they will get worse."

Norris said data storage needed intelligence to allow network managers to identify data for deletion or moving to secondary media. "We address this issue in database applications," said Norris, "but Microsoft could well intend to play the space of office documents."

Microsoft has denied US reports that it has set up a specific division for enterprise storage, but admitted it was investigating storage opportunities and exploring partnerships in the storage arena.

"We have listened to customers' feedback, which tells us that storage management is a real pain," said a Microsoft spokeswoman.

Other suppliers are not sitting still. Oracle last week announced a storage compatibility programme to ensure interoperability between its databases and storage management software from LSI Logic.

"Network managers must deliver continuous availability to their users," said Arun Taneja at independent analyst firm Enterprise Storage Group. "LSI Logic's snapshot feature ensures this need is met with an integrated solution."

Storage management company Fujitsu Softek also said it had signed a source and binary code licence agreement with DataCore to use its virtualisation technology.

Virtualisation simplifies building and implementing storage area networks (Sans) by reducing provisioning to a drag-and-drop operation. As Softek virtualisation works with nearly all storage hardware, network managers can use existing assets from various suppliers.

Even storage hardware suppliers have been doing the lovey-dovey routine. Sworn rivals IBM and Hitachi last week announced they were testing the interoperability of IBM's TotalStorage with Hitachi's Freedom series server. The companies said they would work together to promote interoperability.

"NAS and San technologies are starting to converge and customers are asking us to help them connect products from a broad array of suppliers," said Adalio Sanchez, general manager of storage networking at IBM.

"Promoting interoperability is important for the faster adoption of storage networking technologies," added Marlene Woodworth, general manager at Hitachi.

Norris argued that the reason for co-operation and repositioning was obvious. "They are addressing more or less the same interoperability issues," he said. "The market is growing and they all want a slice of the cake.

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