InformationWeek

August 10, 1998

Serious About Storage

Businesses' need for fast, responsive access to information is creating a storage-centric infrastructure

By Martin J. Garvey with James Governor and Mary Hayes

t's not just about capacity anymore. When it comes to purchasing storage, IS executives increasingly think about shaping an information infrastructure that supports key business goals, and satisfies customers in the process. To give businesses faster access to more detailed data, enterprise storage leader EMC Corp. this week will spend several million dollars for a software company that should help it deliver networked, information-specific storage. Other players in the field-including IBM and Hewlett-Packard-will next week ship Fibre Channel and management products that advance the role storage can play in fulfilling business objectives.

The storage-centric infrastructures IS executives are beginning to build will eventually be based on modular-and typically diverse-storage systems that can incrementally scale up to higher capacities, thus making it easier for users to customize the hardware for applications. The infrastructures also require speeds of 100 Mbytes per second for transporting data between such pools of storage subsystems and servers in storage area networks. Fibre Channel is the high-bandwidth, interconnect technology that offers those speeds over long-distances, while SANs are storage architectures that have servers and subsystems dispersed across a network instead of residing within a data center. Also necessary is software that manages data interaction over long distances.

To an extent, the pieces are already here-Fibre Channel switches and hubs that actually connect the devices in SANs, for example, are growing in popularity as prices rapidly decline. Fibre Channel SANs promise not only single sources of server-independent data for everyone in a company, but also improved performance: Taking loads off the server should make applications run better. Allocating disparate applications, such as data warehousing, accounts receivable, and even video processing, to dedicated storage makes for faster, more complete retrieval of information.

EMC's acquisition of Conley Corp., a $6 million independent software vendor, along with the other forthcoming products, should help IS managers quickly deliver data to users, no matter where it's located in the company. EMC can now take advantage of Conley's software expertise to offer data management and protection across a widely dispersed and more modular infrastructure than its high-performance, but big and expensive, Symmetrix storage systems currently support. It's the management software, says EMC, that's crucial to the success of application-specific SANs, and Conley has a track record in developing Unix and Windows NT server-based load-balancing software.

"Server-based management is required to protect the application," says James Rothnie, EMC's chief technical marketing officer. "Think of connections to an enterprise storage network between now and 2002 that might have dozens of Symmetrix systems and hundreds of servers. Strong load balancing, strong management, and strong failover become critical."

EMC customer Kevin Hughes, manager of CVS Inc.'s technical center in Woonsocket, R.I., acknowledges the importance of data protection throughout the company, especially considering the close ties between storage architectures and business goals.

"We'd had point-of-sale in stores for eight years, but it wasn't until three years ago that we took that data and made it into information we could act on," says Hughes. Consequently, he says, the IT departments have a more strategic role. "We collect a lot of data, we store a lot of information, and we provide a lot of knowledge that makes a difference to business, with results that benefit the customers," Hughes says. For instance, data warehouses can provide pharmacists with information to fill prescriptions more quickly and safely.

Although CVS, the biggest drugstore chain in the United States, isn't ready to implement a SAN, it spent $5 million last year just on high-end storage to support an acquisition campaign that most recently added 208 Arbor Drugs stores to the chain. That came hard on the heels of its even bigger acquisition of Revco Inc. The company suddenly found itself with triple the amount of data for its Unix-based customer and pharmacy data warehouses, and its mainframe-based inventory control. So, when it looked at Unix server vendors last year, a relationship with EMC was a prerequisite, because the vendor supports mainframe data and Unix data in the same system.

"We put a mandate out we wanted EMC," says Hughes. A single storage platform will allow more advanced data warehousing, and flexibility to reallocate capacity as required. EMC gives CVS a storage subsystem that allows it to change the server vendor as required, Hughes says.

At Nielsen Media in Dunedin, Fla., CIO Kim Ross agrees that storage is more crucial now than ever before. Storage "gives us a competitive advantage beyond the mere expectation of uptime and good performance," he says. Ross uses a Sun Microsystems A5000 Fibre Channel storage system to house raw data, compiled daily, on the TV viewing habits of Nielsen families. Networks and advertisers take advantage of direct Web access to that system, to evaluate data about viewership patterns that was gathered just the day before, Ross says. The A5000 is dedicated to this data warehouse alone; using an application-specific approach lets Ross keep the A5000 free of legacy data that would hamper the fast delivery of accurate data to customers.

SAN Shipments
The fact that IS managers are thinking about storage in business terms hasn't escaped vendors' notice. "When we carry on customer meetings, the storage guy stands up and says, 'I'm a package-delivery guy and I need to know the information for my customer if a package isn't on time,'" says Clodoaldo Barrera, IBM's director of strategy for storage systems. "The storage guy explains right down to the nut what the business requires."

IBM says it will stay current with customers' expanding needs: The company next week will ship its modular Versatile Storage Server, which supports multiple flavors of Unix and Windows NT. The VSS is IBM's high-end entry into Seascape, its SAN infrastructure for building storage solutions out of standard components.

Royal Caribbean International in Miami is a test site for VSS. Roland Falcon, manager of technical services, says some benefits are already clear. Although he's not using VSS in a SAN environment, Falcon appreciates having one storage source allocated to application developers. This way, these users no longer need to program which databases, servers, and storage systems to target when analyzing how to draw in new and repeat customers. "The application developer is released from worrying about where the data resides," says Falcon. "It's invisible to them, and that's how I want the infrastructure to be."

VSS's IBM StorWatch and Adstar Distributed Storage Manager software for managing the components of a SAN is critical to Falcon.

"Ideally, I want network-centric storage so anybody can get to any data, but I still want to manage it centrally," he says.

And as users move to fully implement SANs, increasingly robust management tools will be required. Storage management software so far hasn't been stable, says Dataquest analyst Thomas Lahive. "Hubs and the ability to connect stuff together is real, while management won't be real for at least three quarters." Another big issue: The software is often written for a vendor's own product, but SANs will ultimately consist of hardware from multiple sources.

Some of the management software products being introduced this week represent first steps toward solving the problem.

HP's Fibre Channel Manager software will ultimately integrate not only with HP's OpenView software, but also with CA's Unicenter and Tivoli's TME. Eventually, Fibre Channel Manager will manage not only hubs like the new HP Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop device with which it ships, but also all other SAN components regardless of the vendor. Currently, the software lets HP customers maintain and monitor the new hub over distances of more than 20 miles; many hubs work at distances of only five or six miles.

According to Clive Surfleet, HP's enterprise storage marketing manager, "without such management, broad Fibre Channel SANs are impossible."

Independent software vendor Legato Systems next week will introduce its own road map for Intelligent Storage Management. These products will be part of a Java-based, platform-independent line that supports products from multiple vendors. The line includes a reporting tool detailing SAN activities and another that dispenses advice to administrators about reallocating storage to specific applications. All will roll out within the year.

Not to be outdone, Veritas next month will introduce software modules that will allow any failover server in a network to work with any server's storage system in the network. Additionally, Clariion's launch next month of its Open-

Attach for Navisphere management software for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and IBM AIX will provide analytical tools to tune Clariion storage to specific applications such as data warehousing or online transaction processing. By year's end, Seagate Software will debut products for centralized storage management of Compaq hardware.

The Key Resource?
Even Dell Computer, a newcomer to the storage market, has plans to introduce software for monitoring, configuring, backing up, and otherwise supporting its own Fibre Channel storage systems by year's end. Also, Computer Associates will introduce ArcServe, its network backup and restore package, for Fibre Channel on Unix, NT, and NetWare platforms before December, says Jonathan Greene, director of storage products. "Storage will become a key component of enterprise management, and arguably the key resource to manage," he says.

Jim Marra, corporate director of technology planning for Partners HealthCare, a hospital and health facilities holding company in Boston, wants application-specific storage and the software to centrally manage and back up local data. "It's reaching a point where storage isn't relegated to a server. I like to think of it as a big pool now," he says. "But we also need the system software to back up Fibre Channel hardware across the network."

Marra plans on a mix of storage solutions from Compaq to deliver his infrastructure.

Declining storage prices are helping IS managers to at last implement business-critical projects that require huge volumes of data. The money that bought 40 Mbytes of storage in 1989 buys 8 Gbytestoday. Only with such low prices can a broadcast company, for example, begin to digitize 500,000 hours of video that requires 60 exabytes of storage (1 exabyte is 1 million terabytes). That single application represents 100 times the estimated amount of external data that exists worldwide today. Because no single storage system will be available to handle that volume, and because users need the data categorized to make searches viable, a SAN is the only option for handling such data.

Other issues will have to be solved before the architecture's full promise is realized. For example, no work has been done to guarantee that disparate operating systems, databases, and enterprise applications will be able to be integrated as a single source of data.

Unfinished BusinessSerioThere are also file-system issues to be resolved. If the same data is accessed from multiple servers, software must be created to prevent users on other servers from accessing a file that's in use. And implementing record locking, so that a large database can be accessed by multiple users at the same time, is even more complex when it's done across multiple servers.

Until these issues are worked out, some users may turn to network-attached storage in the near term. These storage devices attach directly to network protocols to give users rapid access to files. NAS vendors such as Auspex and Network Appliance don't require replacement of the interconnect, and the devices work over the current network for file and print, says Michael Casey, a senior analyst with Gartner Group Inc. "They'll pick up a lot of the revenue while SAN and Fibre Channel issues are resolved," he says. Within the next month, both Auspex and Network Appliance say they will introduce systems that improve their products' price/performance.

But they don't offer what SANs can ensure: reliable, on-demand, anytime, and anywhere access to information. NaviSite Inc., a Web hosting company and an EMC customer, is interested in using SANs and Fibre Channel to link and mirror its Scotts Valley, Calif., and Andover, Mass., data centers. The goal, says Ted Crawford, director of technical development: "A server on the West Coast accessing storage on the East Coast and using the data. That's futuristic."

-with additional reporting by Logan Harbaugh

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