Get ready for the new value proposition: change your sales pitch--and profit from it.

The growth of the storage industry had been marked by a steadily increasing trend line that was evident in just about every statistic that could be measured from the early 1970s until the middle of the year 2000. Often called the Infinite Disruption, the worldwide events of 2001 brought significant changes to the storage industry landscape. Growth rates slowed, worldwide storage revenue declined, thousands of IT jobs were eliminated and many more moved offshore, and the global economy entered a well-chronicled and lasting decline.

In 2002, a new manifesto for the storage industry unfolded giving some insight into what the new industry needed to do to recover. Beginning in 2004, a new game with new rules was clearly underway.

These rules strongly suggested a new value system for IT where, for the first time, the value proposition became more important than raw price. The impact of this transformation on the storage industry will have lasting effects, most likely altering much of the traditional thinking and defining a need to navigate through the next era now awaiting the storage industry.

The growth rates have slowed from the explosive pre-2001 period. Venture capital money and new business ideas are slowly entering the system, further slowing innovation. In 2000, 87 new storage companies were launched with a first round of funding. Today, only business plans that solve real problems are being funded. As a result, just two new storage companies were funded in 2003. In 2001, the number of storage firms reporting net losses reached 69%. Vendor roadmaps have been pushed out as storage vendors derive lower profitability and, therefore, have less money to invest in their future. The trend for profitability was headed in the right direction as 46% reported losses in 2003. A record for the past three years, 79% of the companies reporting financial results experienced revenue growth in 2003 over 2002 offering more encouragement that a recovery was unfolding. This positive direction is now expected to continue, barring unexpected world events.

Current Perspectives Economic Value

Most users today still look at the hardware purchase price as their primary purchase criteria. This has become increasingly unfortunate and reflects the now misleading and out-of-date viewpoint that the value of the IT infrastructure exists in hardware. This is like measuring the value of the television industry by the number of sets sold (the old rules) rather than the value of the content being transmitted by television (the new rules). With hardware prices per unit of storage falling between 30% and 40% annually, the value of the storage industry is shifting to the data itself and away from the devices that store it.

High Availability

With higher availability at the top of the list for nearly every IT-oriented business, today's goal to achieve the mainframe equivalent level of five 9s system availability for Unix, Windows and Linux systems will remain a distant goal, as inherent limiting architectural design issues are difficult and costly to overcome. None of these non-mainframe systems were designed for I/O and storage management, leading numerous vendors to offer patchwork solutions for specific pieces of the availability equation. Fault-tolerant systems exist throughout the IT infrastructure today and can fix themselves when a hardware or software failure occurs. The future promises that self-healing systems can fix themselves before a failure occurs. With the continued and rapid progress in all aspects of microprocessors, look for self-healing systems to become a reality when R&D funding picks up as the current economic recession turns the corner. The value of self-healing systems to the high-availability equation will be unprecedented and these architectures should eventually spread to any piece of computer technology.

Storage Security

As devices get increasingly more reliable, intrusion has become the bigger threat to attaining high levels of IT availability and data security. Driven by terrorists, hackers and other malicious types, intrusion and a growing number of data security issues are mandating that companies immediately implement dramatic improvements to the current and very porous IT security systems. It's likely that the savvy storage vendors will offer a wide range of storage security functionality including features like WORM and encryption for stored data. These new systems will use hyper-firewalls, advanced encryption, and eventually biometrics--enabling the entire security market to grow from $17 billion in 2001 to more than $40 billion by 2006. Intrusion prevention systems will soon be required to ultimately reach bulletproof or homeland security status. Getting all the way there, however, has become a difficult and over-arching goal for the storage solution and data protection providers. Storage security is the newest storage management discipline.

Topology Selection

The implementation of as many as three different storage topologies (SAN, NAS and DAS) has proven to be a costly venture for most businesses. SANs have appropriately generated widespread appeal but installations have occurred slower than expected, as the implementation process remains resource intensive in a time when resources are shrinking. NAS remains successful and has minimized the need to implement iSCSI in many cases. In the future, however, the storage network will eliminate most of this topology selection decision and take over its management and interface selection. Look for the storage fabric or the intelligent network to decide where data is stored and how it is protected, as self-managed storage networks should eventually replace all three topologies. For now, outgrowing DAS can be painful.

Scalability

Historically, storage vendors have described scalability in terms of capacity increases and maximum limits but, as we have witnessed in the past year, if you don't scale performance and capacity at the same rate, throughput bottlenecks result and the overall capability of the subsystem decreases. Forward thinking vendors are beginning to address scalability in two dimensions and savvy businesses now recognize that scalability involves more than just increasing capacity. Connectivity will soon join capacity and performance in the scalability equation too, as subsystem level throughput and availability are needed to enable the storage infrastructure to maintain equilibrium.

Open Systems

Open systems and interoperability remain a few years away every year. How long have we been hoping for and talking about these concepts, yet they never really seem to be here? It will soon be time to realize that these concepts will not extend beyond any vendor providing a few specific APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to selected business partners outside their own company any time soon. It's now time to strike these terms from our vocabulary and wish list, and hope that existing infrastructure components from a variety of vendors can, at a minimum, co-exist in a non-disruptive manner.

Storage Management

For years, most non-mainframe businesses have stated that backup and recovery is their single biggest headache. The process is often disruptive and it remains difficult to control, often requiring several dissimilar and incompatible software products. In addition, the broad category of replication includes backup, recovery, point-in-time copy, snapshot copy, journaling, mirroring among other variations making it difficult to determine which technique best meets the requirements. As the Unix, Linux and Windows (also called open systems) storage environments have become increasingly larger and now account for more than 85% of all disk capacity shipped annually, a de-facto standard HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) system for these systems is now highly desirable and long overdue. HSM has been a widely accepted and standard practice on mainframe computers for years, providing significant financial and management value. It is now time for non-mainframe computers to provide these powerful mainframe-like storage management functions as they control major storage environments.

Storage Intelligence

Moving the major storage management functions off the server and into the storage fabric or network to minimize host resource consumption and dramatically improve storage management is becoming one of the major new architectural directions for the storage industry. All the major switch and director companies have now launched intelligent switch initiatives. Storage sub-system suppliers are also adding storage management intelligence into their offerings. Server-less or outboard storage management functions will evolve beyond backup and recovery techniques to include mirroring, journaling, snapshot copy, point-in-time copies, and a variety of storage virtualization functions. Advanced SRM (Storage Resource Management) products are aiming at proactive or anticipatory data movement based on user-defined policies that further optimize the storage hierarchy while easing the growing management burden. Storage sub-systems--viewed using one set of management tools and utilities through a single interface--can enable storage administrators to effectively manage far more storage than performing these tasks on each individual server, measurably shrinking the widening storage management gap at last.

Conclusion

The storage industry has embarked on a new course leaving behind many of the tenets that defined the industry for the last 30 years. Expect that cutting-edge technologies will create new industries that have the potential to offset the losses in the old ones. New technologies rarely change the world overnight and predicting their inflection point is difficult. Nonetheless, anticipate looking directly at transparent data movement, libraries of disks, non-volatile RAM chips, object-based storage, miniaturized nano-technologies, and atomic-level manipulation as potential breakthroughs in the years ahead. Companies, individuals and most of the modern world rely on information technology to the point that their survival is threatened if it is not available. Finally, it is not an option to simply react to the changing and unfamiliar landscape; setting a course for your future is the best bet to successfully navigating through the challenges that lie ahead. Events of the last three years have signaled that the IT industry of the future will be different than the IT industry of the past. New storage strategies are emerging that identify the pathways to success--and these will often have no resemblance to their predecessors.

High-Availability Metrics

Availability
  Class

     1        Unmanaged (not important)

     2        Managed (nice to have)

     3        Well managed (operationally important)

     4        Fault-tolerant (vital to business)

     5        High-availability (mission critical)

     6        Very high-availability (top-security)

     7        Ultra high-availability (homeland security)

                              System
                              Availability
Availability  Unavailability  (percent of
   Class      (minutes/year)  100 uptime)

     1              50,000.0  90.0

     2               5,000.0  99.0

     3                 500.0  99.9

     4                  50.0  99.99

     5                   5.0  99.999

     6                   0.5  99.9999

     7                  0.05  99.99999

Availability  Data Recovery                 Operating
   Class      Architecture                  System

     1        Tape, offsite (trucks)

     2        Tape, onsite

     3        Electronic vault (libraries)  Win2K

     4        Consolidation, SAN            UNIX Linux

     5        RAID, mirroring, SAN

     6        Hot-site, remote mirroring    2/OS

     7        Self-healing systems

Source: Horison Information Strategies