Since SAN technologies are always changing, it can be difficult to make components
from different vendors interoperate. We recommend sticking with
one or two vendors and testing extensively. When vendors offer to show you
their latest and greatest products, kick them out. Tell such vendors that you
want to see only the stuff that has been used in the field for a while. Let other
people work through the initial product bugs.1 This is your data, the most
precious asset your company has. Not a playground.
Sticking with a small number of vendors helps to establish a rapport.
Those sales folks and engineers will have more motivation to support you, as
a regular customer.
That said, it’s best to subject new models to significant testing before you
integrate them into your infrastructure, even if they are from the same vendor.
Vendors acquire outside technologies, change implementation subsystems,
and do the same things any other manufacturer does. Vendors’ goals are
generally to improve their product offerings, but sometimes, the new offerings
are not considered improvements by folks like us.
Create a set of tests that you consider significant for your environment.
A typical set might include industry-standard benchmark tests, applicationspecific
tests obtained from application vendors, and attempts to run extremely
site-specific operations, along with similar operations at much higher
loads.