Vendors Work to Cure Incompatibility Blues

Michael Nadeau

Incompatible backup storage formats are a big problem for many businesses. Although the physical formats that govern how data is laid down are identical in a given backup medium, a brand X drive might not be able to read a tape produced by a brand Y drive due to differing logical-medium formats that define things like file header information. Also, a vendor's products can be incompatible across different operating systems.

Backup software and hardware vendors hope that a new standard, SIDF (System- Independent Data Format), will make these compatibility problems obsolete. SIDF 1.0, based on Novell's SMS (Storage Management System) data format, is currently being presented for acceptance by the ISO. Key backup and operating-system vendors like Ex abyte, Palindrome, Novell, Mountain Network Solutions, and Cheyenne Software support SIDF. But Microsoft, which has its own Microsoft Tape Format standard, has not publicly endorsed SIDF.

SIDF supports DOS, Unix, NetWare, OS/2, and FTAM (File Transfer, Access, and Management) file systems, but it can be extended to support others. Although SIDF will most affect tape backup, it can be applied to both sequential (e.g., tape) and nonsequential (e.g., hard and CD-ROM drives) media.

SIDF-capable products are shipping now, but they won't solve storage-compatibility problems overnight: Media must be recorded in SIDF to achieve cross-platform compatibility. Rerecording old tapes is costly and time-consuming, but it's worthwhile for some companies, according to Jeff Plat˜n, chairman of the SIDF Association. He says the less attractive alternative is to keep your older equipment--drives, backup software, and perhaps the operating system--on hand to read non-SIDF archived data.

"SIDF is probably th e wave of the future," says James McNeil, executive vice president of business development at Cheyenne Software. But he adds that Cheyenne will also support its proprietary tape format, because the company cannot assume that its current customers will immediately convert to SIDF.