You can't win the game if you don't know the rules: what you should know to win the new storage game.

The history of the storage industry has been marked by a continual upward or improving trend-line that was evident in just about every element that could be measured until the year 2001. In 2001, things began to change. Growth rates slowed, storage revenues declined globally, thousands of IT jobs were eliminated, and the economy entered a deep and lasting slump. We are still in this economic trough and its impact on the storage industry will have lasting effects that will alter many aspects of the storage industry. In essence, the rules and value of the storage industry will make this a new game when we finally emerge from the extended grip of the IT winter.

Several of the changes will address or eliminate many of the lingering issues of the past while others will simply give-in to a different approach. Some of the key changes are captured in the accompanying Table (see page 10).

It's not clear when we will emerge from the IT winter, but when we do, expect things to be different. End-users and vendors alike will have had more than three years to rethink what works and what doesn't work anymore. This cooling-off period is also being characterized by a slower rate of change than at any previous time since the early 1990s. Venture capital money and new business ideas are barely creeping into the system, further slowing innovation. Only business plans that solve real problems are being funded. Vendor roadmaps are being pushed out as storage vendors see lower profitability and therefore less money to invest in the future.

Most users today still look at the hardware purchase price as their primary purchase criteria. This has become increasingly unfortunate and reflects the now old and out-of-date viewpoint that hardware is where the value of the IT infrastructure exists. 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 falling at 35-40 percent annually, the value of the storage industry shifts to what we do with the data, not where we store it.

With high availability on the top of the list for every IT-oriented business, today's goal to achieve the mainframe level of five 9's system availability must and will spread beyond the mainframe to the Unix, Linux and, hopefully, the Win2K platforms. This will happen quicker for some platforms than others based on inherent limiting architectural design issues.

As we debate and implement as many as three different storage topologies--SAN, NAS, and DAS--the future value of the storage network will lie in eliminating this decision completely. Look for the storage network to decide where data is stored as self-managed storage networks should eventually replace all three topologies.

Storage vendors have historically described scalability in terms of capacity increases, but as we have learned 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. Vendors will consistently address scalability in two dimensions to be successful. Connectivity will join the scalability formula too, though after capacity and performance.

For years, most non-mainframe businesses have stated that backup/recovery is their single biggest headache. The process is disruptive and it remains difficult to control, often requiring several dissimilar software products. For storage management software vendors, a single software solution that manages the backup and recovery for file and block-based applications in centralized and distributed systems will have the most success. As the Unix, Linux and Win2K (formerly called open systems) storage environments have increasingly larger storage environments, a de-facto standard and user-friendly HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) system will become acceptable and will finally emerge as an accepted practice.

Moving storage management functions off the server (called draining the server) and into the storage network to minimize host resource consumption and dramatically improve storage management will become one of the new architectural directions for the storage industry. Though initial acceptance has been slow, mainly due to economic issues for vendors and end-users alike, server-less or outboard storage management technologies will evolve beyond backup and recovery techniques to include mirroring, replication, snapshot copy and a variety of virtualization functions. Advanced SRM (Storage Resource Management) products will soon make possible proactive or anticipatory data movement that further optimizes the storage hierarchy while easing the growing management burden. Storage viewed using one set of management tools and utility software through a single interface, can enable storage administrators to effectively manage far more storage than ever before, noticeably reducing the management gap at last.

The file and block data structures will give way to one common object storage format. Today, these systems are defined by the location of the file system and storage devices. OSD (Object-based Storage Devices) will begin to emerge and will be accompanied by a long-overdue and badly needed taxonomy including naming conventions, indexing, access control and data attributes/properties. From this we will then move towards active storage, where the storage entity understands the content and structure of the data it manages.

Fault-tolerant systems can fix themselves when a hardware or software failure occurs. Self-healing systems can fix themselves before a failure occurs. With the continued rapid progress in all aspects of microprocessors, look for self-healing systems to become a reality as R&D funding picks up after the current economic recession finally 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.

The requirement to modify any piece of the IT infrastructure in a non-disruptive manner is already mandatory for most businesses as downtime of any type becomes very costly and unacceptable. Vendors with disruptive upgrades and maintenance strategies will be at a major competitive disadvantage as new games for maintenance and upgrades drive new rules.

Driven by terrorists, hackers and other malicious types, intrusion and a growing number of data security issues are mandating that companies quickly implement dramatic improvements to the current porous IT security systems. These new systems will use biometrics, advanced encryption, and spur the securities market to grow from $6 billion in 2000 to $21 billion by 2005. They should ultimately approach bullet-proof status--getting all the way there will be another story but will become an over-arching goal for the storage providers.

As the raging battles between which interface will win in industry trade magazines and storage/network conferences fall on deaf ears, the user community and vendors will at last realize and accept that de-facto standards will win and the debates will serve little real purpose. The market will make the winning decision, not the vendor.

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

Today, the value of the IT infrastructure is well known and can be described in financial terms. The value of the data that the IT infrastructure contains is seldom known. Who knows how much the Human Genome Project's data is worth? If the cures for serious diseases are unlocked or genetic problems can be addressed, the value of this data is infinite. Businesses will begin to realize that the real value of their IT function is not the infrastructure, but the data it contains. Remember the television set example?

Though the economic downturn has impacted many aspects of our lives, this period will serve to change the hard and fixed rules of the past ending some concepts that just didn't work and at the same time giving the industry a period of time to realize that the basic value proposition of the past no longer holds. The value is different, the game is different, and the rules for success will be different.

New Game - New Rules

Old Game, Old Rules                  New Game, New Rules

Hardware purchase price mentality    Value purchase price mentality
Five 9's a goal                      Five 9's everywhere
SANs, NAS, DAS, ...                  Self-managed storage
Heterogeneous SANs predominant       Homogeneous SANs predominant
Scalability = capacity               Scalability = capacity and
                                     performance
Backup/recovery disruptive           Backup/recovery transparent
Storage management server-based      Storage management network-based
(inboard)                            (outboard)
Files and blocks                     Objects
Fault-tolerant systems               Self-healing systems
Disruptive system changes            Non-disruptive system changes
Islands of storage, networks and     Consolidated IT resources
servers
Porous security systems              Bullet-proof security systems
Interface standards battles rage     De-facto standard interfaces win
Endless struggle for "open systems   "Open systems and interoperability"
and interoperability."               terms finally stricken from IT
Heterogeneity perceived as critical  vocabulary -- it just doesn't
for storage access.                  happen. Heterogeneity perceived as
                                     less important for storage access.
Value of data unknown                Value of data well known
Youth over experience, wants         Experience over youth, needs
Old vendor value proposition based   New vendor value proposition based
on price, feeds and speeds           on value to business

Table developed by Horison Information Strategies, www.horison.com