Storage Roundtable: addressing the issues today.

When you think of mass storage, you tend to think of Silicon Valley, Route 128, or Colorado. The fact is that one of the nation's active storage centers is in the Twin Cities: Minneapolis/St. Paul. Recently, Computer Technology Review, in cooperation with Imation, assembled a regional storage forum to explore pressing storage networking issues. The transcript follows.

The first part of this article appeared in the October issue (Q3 2001) of Storage Inc., the second part in the November issue of CTR, and the third part in the December issue of CTR. The final part appears here.

Roundtable Participants:

Doug Ingraham is the Manager of Product Management for the Marketing for the Storage Router Business Unit of Cisco Systems, Inc.

Nick Williams is the Senior SAN Consultant at CNT.

Jim Ellis is the Director of Strategic Marketing at Imation.

Mike Hogan is the Storage Consulting Practice Manager at Imation.

Bill Peldzus is the Storage Consulting Marketing Mana-ger at Imation.

Rusty Rosenberger is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Imation.

Jeff Tetzlaff is the Director of Marketing at I-TECH.

Carla Kennedy is the Vice President of Marketing for the Switch Product Group at QLogic.

Dave Sass is the Vice President of Marketing and Alliances at Sistina Software.

Brad Stamas is the Director of Storage Domain Management for StorageTek.

Erik Norlander is the Director of Product Marketing at Tricord Systems.

Bill Webster is a Senior Product Manager with Veritas.

Dan McCormick is the Director of Product Marketing Strategy at XIOtech.

Mark Ferelli: There's the very realistic pain of negotiating service level agreements (SLAs). What is acceptable performance? What is not? How much is the SSP willing to commit? How much is the user willing to trust? And what kinds of data are they willing to trust and outsource?

Doug Ingraham: Mark, the issue of SLAs is not new to the IT organizations. So one of the things you may be asking is if people are willing to accept an SLA from an outside organization, not about the issue of the delivery of their storage. It may be more of an issue of economics, but also can I trust the agreement. If I go outside, I may ask for things a little bit more detailed than I maybe assumed that my internal IS organization is going to provide. The SSPs like to think they are offering you a utility service within the IS organization today. So the question might not be what's it take to get to the utility, but what's it going to take to get to the utility that maybe is outside of the organization today that's shareable across multiple organizations.

Mark Ferelli: I'm sure the confidence issue ... it's a big one. What makes the negotiating of the SLA so vitally important is the fact that it's sort of the physical manifestation of the level and direction of the trust involved. Let me ask you folks now a question that's come up once or twice back in my offices. We talk about clustering as a strategy to help manage storage costs. What does clustering actually bring to the storage market? I think it's a network-based concept, but what does it bring to the mass storage space?

Eric Norlander: Certainly you're speaking to the heart and soul of our value proposition. I think fundamentally the concept of an appliance is a concept that's been proven. Cisco Systems certainly is the best example of that, as they took the basic bridging and routing technologies from the late 80s and early 90s and turned it into a very successful organization effectively delivering networking appliances. We are now at a time where we are able to create appliance solutions for storage problems and that provides really significant benefits in terms of the deployment and ongoing management. But, typically the problem with the appliance model had been how do you grow those environments without doubling, tripling, quadrupling the management burden that goes along with it.

Clustering technology allows you to do that. It allows you to go from a hundred gigabytes to multiple terabytes without increasing the management burden fundamentally. Tricord's clustering technology, which is fundamentally based on file level awareness, is a new technology introduced to the market in an appliance format that we believe brings together the best of all worlds for specific application solutions and point solutions. And we'll continue to see these types of requirements demanded by the end user community whether it's general file services or specific solutions around exchanged environments, web server environments, or data base environments. As long as we continue to face the complex interoperability issues that we see and have discussed already this morning, there will be a need for appliance level solutions that can scale without putting a new burden on the management and that's where clustering technology comes into play.

Mark Ferelli: Dave, file system awareness is very much a part of what Sistina is involved with. How do you see it as it applies to cluster environments?

Dave Sass: Well, it's sort of a different concept. Rather than looking at storage as sort of a block level, file system clustering allows the application to take advantage of the storage clustering on the back end, which is sort of a different concept. There were some comments earlier about how the ISVs need to be more aware of the architectures that are evolving and I believe that as well, too. I think the real appeal of clustering, and I agree a lot with what Eric is saying, is that everybody would like to be able to take advantage of lower infrastructure costs as long as they have the management capabilities that go along with it. We're seeing a lot of people building very powerful server cluster frameworks and there's certainly a lot of software in the marketplace today that will allow load balancing and fail over with hundreds of servers. A cluster would end up being about 1/10th of the infrastructure cost versus buying a very large consolidated server.

On the back end of it in order to prevent the management costs from really escalating, you have to have a file level cluster technology that allows the servers to have single access and write/read access to the data along with the utilities to manage it. That's what we're developing and the appeal is pretty much the same as it's always been. Customers want the ability to be able to choose from a wide range of different hardware platforms both server-wise and storage-wise because they can leverage lower costs and competition against vendors. If you look at the server marketplace, in my opinion it's really become very commoditized over the last few years, especially if you go back to when I started in the industry where it was just predominantly mainframe oriented and I think the industry is sort of screaming for similar commoditization at the storage levels which gets back to the discussions we were having about the utility.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could just go take anybody's storage and plug it in. That's a nice thing to think about, but obviously you have to go through the difficulties of testing all this stuff to make sure it works. I think this will get better as we go along and I think you'll start to see file level clustering becoming a more prevalent concept in the future because it does have a tendency to commoditize the cost on the back end of the storage.

Mark Ferelli: It's interesting to think about things like servers as commoditized when you have the growth of unexpected technologies like the Linux operating system. Even with everything going around, we know where we are ... we're in UNIX or we're in NT or Windows, where have you, and then Linux comes along and changes the equation just a little bit.

I want to ask one last question and it's going to be a go-around-the-table kind of last question. I'm being terribly selfish. As you mostly know, the readers of CTR are dominantly in the channel. They're integrators, they're VARs, they're OEMs, and so I'm going to ask you as storage networking evolves to the next generations of products to the new levels of performance and reliability that they're heading for, what is the role of the integrator or the reseller in terms of issues of development, in terms of testing, in terms of customer service? Where do you as vendors see your reseller partners playing the most actively?

Mike, do you want to start?

Mike Hogan: Sure. I would see their role initially as a responsibility in understanding what they're good at and what they're not good at. Understanding if they're going to try to go after a certain opportunity in a storage space, which for them is a large opportunity. I think a lot of the integrators are admirers looking at the space saying, "geez, I'd love to be able to provide this value for our customers." But in many situations, the bridge to do that doesn't exist and I think part of their role is to help the vendors that they are representing first of all understand what their requirements are. They have to understand what their customers want. They have to be good at seeking out who the right vendors are to put together a solution, which in storage networking is very integrated with multiple vendors. And making some decisions as far as who those right players are and look at trying to solve the problem first. They need to start looking at trying to do more than just sell a product and with that mind set, they need to go back to the vendors and say we don't just want to get the product from you. We want to partner with you and provide some two-way value that says we're going to help you understand what our customers want and in return, we want you to help us become educated and be that value to them.

Eric Norlander: Our experience since introducing our server appliance technology to the market and specifically focusing on our reseller partners, which represent for Tricord Systems fully two-thirds of our revenue plan moving forward, is that as Mike points out, they tend to be closer to the end user requirements. We rely on them. Our technology is at a level where we can really separate ourselves from the hardware changes. Whether we move into an Infiniband world with DAS or VI or iSCSI or other, our technology will be able to move very quickly. That's what our responsibility is to create appliance solutions that highlight the benefits of clustering. Our retailers add value to our organization by being able to work together with us and define new appliances that provide integrated application oriented solutions. That's where we really see their value. Being close to the end users, helping us define those next appliance solutions, and in fact in many cases, the actual construction of the solution and the delivery of the solution.

Bill Webster: I want to follow on Eric's comments. I think they're spot on in a lot of ways. The integrator really has the shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with the customer and is probably going to have the most innovative understanding of what the problems are everybody's trying to solve. At Veritas today because of the wide array of software products that we offer, fundamentally, they require working with a lot of palmers and working with and through a lot of resellers to put it all together. We do a lot of it ourselves, but we are highly dependent on having a trained and very skilled group of integrators and partners within the channel organization to help that as well and they're very vocal. We do our best to provide the highest possible understanding of our products, our strategy, the education we think is required for them to move forward and today, it's fundamentally an extension of our sales chain.

It's evolving into being more than that. I work in the field quite a lot with partners because of the nature of the product I manage in the Vertex program is fundamentally grounded on strong partnerships. We really are now getting a lot more of our future product requirements directly from the integrators as well as from customers as we have in the past. So I think it's not going to change dramatically, but I think it's going to be enhanced by getting and having a better closed loop if you will back from the integrator of the channel community as a whole into product requirements and into being able to take advantage of some of the things we're already doing as far as aggregating products together, doing some testing, or working with the likes of Imation to do much of that same type of thing.

Dan McCormick: I think back just even to the last quarter about some of the more successful deals we had with some of our integrators and resellers selling it to Chrysler and Southwest Airlines and really what the opportunity was for them and the responsibilities that Mike pointed out was not just understanding the customers' requirements as they relate to a particular project or a point in time, but rather to understand what the business objectives of the overall organization were going forward for some number of years into the future and how building an architecture today that would help the evolve into that organization that they're going to become in three or five years from now and understanding how the storage infrastructure plays a role in that and the various applications that will be integrated into that, etc. So I think they can bring a larger view in terms of what the over all organization is doing as well as a longer term view of what the organization is trying to accomplish. So that's really I think one of the benefits that from our perspective in the reseller community in owing that relationship to the customer.

Carla Kennedy: Dan hit it right on the head.

Jim Ellis: Where the integrator will certainly help is sifting through those options. Most of the options available will work, but usually there's a better option or the best option for that environment and that's where we see, you know, the role of the integrators. They could really help sift through that, understand the user requirements, and then, you know, suggest probably the best option rather than just an option.

Dave Sass: I agree with about everything everybody's saying here too. We're just getting started with working with resellers and OEMs and the likes and I think a lot of it gets down to that we've really decided early on what businesses do we want to be in versus what businesses don't we want to be in. So I think the resellers and systems integrators are key to us to having the front lines with the customer, the relationship with the customer, and we obviously want to provide the back end support. But along with that as we discussed earlier, you as a vendor sort of have to go through that process first even though it's nice to think you can just push it off to a systems integrator all the support issues. So we're developing the training capabilities, the certification program for our technologies and we ultimately have to test the stuff end to end, and once we understand the issues that go along with it, then we're in a position to really look for who's best to support, you know, ultimately the customer that's going to be buying the product that our technology goes into.

Jeff Tetzlaff: Mike talked about resellers understanding what they're good at and what they're not good at, and understanding what their customers want. Picking the best solution, not just selling products. What I add to that is making sure that this stuff works when they put it in. From a customer standpoint, I don't think there's anything more frustrating than getting pieces, parts, or a system that should work together only to put it together and you find out that it doesn't and no one's really tested that. So I see the role of the integrator as one of testing and making sure that all this stuff plays together and when, not if, there are issues that come up providing that support to the customer.

Rusty Rosenberger: Although the types of resellers I work with within my product lines are different than the storage industry, I think the requirements are pretty much the same. It's kind of a two-way responsibility. One is to help translate the business needs, customer needs, that lead the product. The other is the transfer of the education of the technologies and the application of those technologies to meet those requirements. So it's kind of a two-way deal.

Nick Williams: I like what Jim Ellis said. There are so many offerings out there. I think the integrator is in a position to really sift through that, to make recommendations based off that. That's how I see the future.

Brad Stamas: We think that there's a wonderful opportunity tot resellers and integrators at this time. A lot of our product does go down those channels. We see that, you know, as the choice ... the sources of the components for the solution come from multiple places, and the resellers, integrators have great opportunity and they're going to play a good role for StorageTek as well.

Jeff Tetzlaff: As some of you may or may not know, we do a vast majority of all of our distribution actually through sellers, resellers, systems integrators, etc. As part of our entering into the market, we signed up with about 70 or 80 systems integrators and resellers who had specific storage knowledge to actually bring our products into the marketplace. What we're seeing the value in is that they need to go beyond just kind of the onetime sell and leave. It needs to be an ongoing partnership. The customers want basically a turnkey solution that gets delivered and then they want the ongoing support. If you delivered me four components, I want to call you first and not the floor manufacturers and so it's kind of that not just hit and run, but come in and be there lot more of the long term.

Mark Ferelli: So you see a responsibility well past a sort of pick/pack/ship kind of mentality.

Jeff Tetzlaff: Yes, for this environment.

Bill Peldzus: Well, going last, I guess I disagree with what everybody said (laughter). No, I think it basically comes down to being strategic versus tactical. I mean if somebody needs 500 gig and they're looking at what my margin is in commission versus why you need 500 gig, how are you going to use it, how are you going to protect it, how are you going to make it available, that's when you make that transition from being tactical to strategic and really partnering with the customer so I go with a lot of the comments said around here. That's the real value of that reseller. It's another person in the overall solution, but if the perceived value is they're really pampering with the customer, that's what the value is.

Mark Ferelli: It's taking up the extra step. It's okay, 500 gig now, but what are they going to be next week, next quarter, next month, next year, and if they are sophisticated enough to have a three or a five year plan for their IT organization, going there, too.

Lady and gentlemen, yon are busy people and I really appreciate the time that you shared with us today. I want to thank you for your participation. Once again, thanks to Imation for putting all of this together, allowing us to come together and discuss issues of storage networking.