InformationWeek

Dick Blaskie, executive VP of marketing at Xiotech, says virtualization will set storage complexity "on its duff." The Xiotech system that Sallie Mae has in the testing lab will eventually expand across an entire network; later this summer it will be implemented across multiple Magnitude nodes. Administrators will be able to point, click, and add individual components and controllers as needed, Blaskie says.

Mowery is already exploiting the simplicity of Xiotech's product. With Magnitude, he can quickly move data across 12 servers in the lab. "And a junior administrator is trained to work with Magnitude in a day," Mowery says. Such simplicity is part of the reason he didn't want to work with Symmetrix, which was already in use at the main data center at Sallie Mae. "EMC is a more robust system, but it's cumbersome to maintain because it requires EMC engineers," Mowery says. "The storage decision includes how fast we can deploy it."

The desire for simplicity is driving other storage decisions as well. Rainville at Lycos says Compaq's storage maintenance is straightforward, and he prefers that to EMC's approach. EMC's technology "is only as good as you manage it," he says. Even service-level agreements don't help, Rainville says, because no such agreement can take the place of an IT administrator.

Don Swatik, VP of strategic planning at EMC, says his company's black-box technology, which consolidates the storage needs of every relevant server, is easier than having a skilled administrator tending to the captive storage attached to each of those servers. He cites a report from IT Centrics about the amount of data that one administrator can manage: captive storage--200 Gbytes; consolidated storage--1,900 Gbytes, or almost 2 terabytes. "We'll also tightly integrate our management software with the enterprise frameworks from Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM's Tivoli," he says.

However, businesses are tired of sales that include software they'll never need, Solutions-II's Bowling says. "EMC would like to offer software in response to our hardware RFPs, and we already have different software in-house for everything they offer," Aetna's Brighton says. "We'd like EMC to follow in the spirit of the RFP and stick to the hardware."

Performance is another area in which customers are looking for innovation. Storage performance is generally judged by how long it takes a user to receive a requested piece of data and the number of those requests that a system can handle at one time. Storage system "bake offs"--head-to-head trials--or at least minimum performance results guaranteed by vendors through service-level agreements are typical at some companies.

Imation Corp., a $1.4 billion storage-services company that was once a business unit of 3M, is offering businesses another option. Imation won't recommend any single vendor, but will record features and functions of storage systems so customers can make informed purchase decisions. "The customer gets the best possible ideas for their environment," says Bill Peldzus, a technology manager in professional services for Imation. "We just make sure they have all the real-time data they need to cut the check." Peldzus says the average customer will spend $15,000 with Imation.

Dell's Kornfeld says good performance is the result of the right load balancing among multiple SAN components. Dell helps customers balance the number of servers, switches, controllers, and disks and uses ratios to help in the decision-making, or it lets customers bring in their apps to run with operational or dummy data. "I haven't been involved with a customer yet where what we installed hasn't solved what they needed," Kornfeld says.

Demand is also growing among service providers that will have to consolidate storage for multiple customers. "We can see performance needs in the 100,000 I/Os-per-second space," says David Scott, director of business strategy for HP's enterprise storage group. "That's a leap from where we've been in the past because we're talking about many apps from many companies." Hewlett-Packard plans to unveil storage products this month that will help customers contend with new levels of scalability. Scott says the new technology will mirror the server bus' evolution to the high-speed cross-bar interconnect that lets symmetric multiprocessor servers scale to 32, 64, and even 128 processors.

Storage-capacity growth of as much as 600% annually has had a clear impact on price and performance during the past three to five years, Scott says. Since April 1999, disk-drive capacity has grown from 18 Gbytes to the 73 Gbytes that's expected soon from Seagate. The higher-capacity drives cost less per megabyte and give businesses the opportunity to save a lot of money. HP also lets customers swap drives on its storage systems. "We're supporting 50 Gbytes now, and we'll support the 73-Gbyte drives when they're available," Scott says. Aetna's Brighton likes what's happened with the floor space in the data center. "I'm getting a couple of acres of DASD [direct access storage device] down to the size of my living room," he says.

The storage industry has never been known as an equal-opportunity employer. Every enterprise storage vendor admits to a level of lock-in--the need to use proprietary technology to maximize storage performance--but EMC takes the most criticism in this area due to its intelligent controller technology. Jack Garrahan, VP of global marketing at EMC, wants to put the onus on server vendors. "Every vendor is free to join our Fibre Alliance so they can manage anything on the SAN from a single point on the SAN," he says. Industry analyst Carl Greiner says once companies upgrade to a Fibre Channel-based SAN, they can create different categories of the storage they need. "Customers could just use EMC for the most critical data," Greiner says. But that's only 30% to 40% of the total. "EMC is like the platinum-level service," Greiner says, "and the other vendors can play underneath that well enough."

The best news for customers is that more choices and competition should help the market leaders keep up with customer requests--and that's a necessity as the Internet economy and storage needs heat up.

return to page 1