What issues are likely to arise when merging SAN fabrics with switches from different vendors?

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ANSWERED October 2009:

As far as the switches, there shouldn't be any major issues with merging fabrics to an expanded SAN due to the Fabric Shortest Path First (FSFP) routing protocol. FSFP was created in 1997 by Brocade Communications Inc., and the protocol has since been adopted as the routing standard between Fibre Channel (FC) switches within a fabric.

To further ensure a successful merge, confirm that the following prerequisites have been fulfilled:

• Check for conflicting named zones and rename them if required
• Ensure that there's interoperability between the firmware and protocol versions on each switch, and perform updates to these if necessary. Some switches may also require an additional hardware module to make this functionality available.