Why Storage Should Be A Service.

In this two-part article, editor-at-large Hal Glatzer looks at the question of where your data should reside: in-house; in your own storage devices? Or outside, in a service bureau's hardware? This month: the case for storage as a service. Next month: the case for keeping storage in-house.

Storing backup files offsite isn't a new idea, but storing primary data and nearline files off-site is. Should "storage" be a "service?" That's the premise of storage service bureaus like Storage Networks, which made the case for the idea in an interview last October.

"What we offer is high availability and continuity," said Ruya Atac, director of services marketing at Storage Networks. "It's what the top 'Fortune 10' companies can do for themselves, but we're opening the opportunity to the 'Fortune 5000."'

"Sophisticated customers understand that storage is becoming a huge portion of their IT infrastructure," she told me. "And what they're doing in their data centers today is not only primary storage, but [also] backup-and-restore operations, which are essentially a tape-based strategy. You can't always meet your recovery deadlines with tape: it's a very slow medium. I'm talking about whole-disk copies, recoverable within minutes. Tape does not make for high availability or business continuity. You need high availability and restorability."

At this early stage, it's impossible to predict or even to generalize about what it will cost a customer to take advantage of storage services. Yet Atac cited serveral factors that lead her to assert the cost-advantages of doing so:

"We can turn customer's capital costs into operations costs because we already own the storage equipment," she said. "The customer doesn't have to risk capital on new technology because we evaluate it and manage it. Also, we lease the networking lines at bulk rates, so we offer economies of scale that only the very largest companies, doing it themselves, can match. The customer's time-to-solution is shorter too, with no need for long evaluation, setup, and training period."

"Storage Points Of Presence"

Storage Networks has so far deployed about 72TB worth of storage across its five U.S. installations, which Atac called "storage points of presence." The Boston, New York, Chicago, Houston, and San Jose sites are tied in to the company's headquarters ("our global operations center")in Waltham, MA and six more sites are scheduled to come online by year's end, in Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

"Each site is configured by EMC with its Symmetrix storage architecture and disk arrays, and its Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software. "EMC sets the 'gold standard' for enterprise-scale storage," she declared. "The arrays, the operational technicians, and the management functions are all tied together for extended services. We can do backups, of course, but also replication, if a customer wants copies of their data sent to another location. Most IT managers believe that their backup strategies are good, but they probably can't restore everything from tape in a hurry--and they know it."

My Place Or Yours?

Part of the problem for enterprises--and therefore an opportunity for service providers--is in the area of human resources. "There are thousands of open IT positions today," Atac noted, "so finding, training, and keeping the best people is a challenge and, once you have them you want them to be able to guarantee continuous availability of your data, to have the flexibility to adapt the storage system whenever your business needs change, and to be able to add storage capacity whenever you need it. We believe that, for all three of those challenges, we offer a good value proposition compared to doing it in-house."

Those activities are, she acknowledged, an outgrowth of Storage Networks' consultancy business. "We help evaluate gaps in the customer's current storage management and we suggest consolidation, replication, or whatever is needed. Customers can find their own solutions and implementation strategies; but we can do that too, either at our data centers or at theirs and, if it's at theirs, we can offer our professional services. We can transfer the knowledge it takes to manage their own data centers. Of course, if they want us to provide the entire storage life cycle, we can do that with engineering services and '24/7' service contracts."

Uptime For E-Commerce

"A packaged service should guarantee uptime. Look at how long it takes eBay [the auction Web site] to recover from downtime! Outages at eBay or at Amazon[.com] can be eliminated by approaching storage from a strategic perspective. Moreover, e-commerce businesses are in an exaggerated growth phase, and there's huge turnover in their human-resources: it's that people-problem again. E-commerce businesses represent a strong potential growth area for us. They have, let's say, six months before their IPO. We can give them the kind of storage infrastructure that a 'Fortune 101 company has, but without any capital expenditure from their venture capital sources. The company can spend their money on their core competencies instead of on making a big storage infrastructure for themselves. I think that e-commerce will be where our business shifts to in the future. It will take time and it will take our being seen as a trusted advisor. Your data is and the whole point for us is that we have to establish trust."

As of October, she said, Storage Networks had 47 customers, five of which were in what Atac called the "management" phase, meaning that they are paying for network-storage services, and three of the five customers are involved in e-commerce business. The other 42 customers are still in what she called the "expertise" phase, paying for needs-assessment in advance of implementation.

If a customer closes its account with Storage Networks or can't pay, their data is returned to them on tape. "If they go out of business," she explained, "their data probably isn't worth much anyway--and in any case, we can't use it."

"Our biggest competition is the status quo," Atac declared. "We know that most prospective customers want to spend the capital and do this on their own, but hardware vendors--even EMC, where I worked for three years--can provide only the pieces: they don't manage whole storage networks and they don't offer a pas-as-you-go strategy. We want to approach customers who aren't tied to the status quo."