Keen eye to diversify
Keen eye to diversify
Sep 15, 2005: The storage market has always been about hardware, but these days it takes more to succeed in storage than just big disks. David Braue finds out how storage industry leaders are taking the industry in new directions.
Storage used to be about little more than tape and disk. With the explosion in storage area networks (SANs) continuing to inflate storage requirements, however, vendors are now turning to innovation to deliver full-service information management ecosystems.
That's been a big ask, considering that innovation in storage was previously about how quickly a company could move bits on and off of disks and tapes. Even in the early days of SANs, storage was a technology play: it was considered news that Vendor X had gotten such-and-such Fibre Channel switch working with such-and-such storage array from Vendor Y. It seems insignificant now, but interoperability was a defining characteristic of an environment in which vendors were each pursuing their own visions of what a SAN should be.
These days, competition has moved to a much deeper level. Storage investments are driven by buzzwords such as governance, information lifecycle management (ILM), virtualisation, and grid computing-which, together, aim to manage information from the moment it's created until it is destroyed. Self-aware storage and virtualisation allow provisioning of storage resources as application requirements change, while ILM prioritises and shifts data between storage tiers, which vary in latency and cost, according to how quickly the business needs to access it.
Many paths to success
It's now clear what characteristics are expected from tomorrow's storage, but delivering on this vision has proved far from simple since each technology area requires a complex toolset of its own. Unsurprisingly, acquisition has become the best way of stealing a march on competitors rather than trying to keep up with the state-of-the-art exclusively through in-house R&D.
Acquisition has quickly concentrated storage innovation into a few large companies. Storage stalwart Legato, for example, bought niche vendor OTG Software to obtain its EmailXtender and DiskXtender archiving technologies.
Legato was quickly snapped up itself by EMC, which since 2000 has spent billions buying nearly a dozen companies including document management giant Documentum, storage resource management startup Astrum Software, and rich media management provider Avalon Consulting Group.
For its part, IBM has been improving its storage in-house but using acquisitions to bolster its Tivoli range of enterprise management tools. "Customers understand that adding more hardware is not going to be the solution," says Grant Smith, ANZ regional manager for Tivoli with IBM. "it's all about managing the complexity of your environment and being able to do that in a way that reduces your TCO."
Intense periods of acquisition are nothing new in IT, where small companies are established as hotbeds of innovation with the specific goal of being acquired down the track. But the sheer size of many of the storage-related acquisitions-fully mature software providers such as Documentum, and email archiver KVS, which was purchased by Veritas, are only two of many such targets-reflects the intensity with which the storage industry is expanding in new directions.
The US$13.5 billion merger between Veritas and security giant Symantec will take this trend to the extreme, combining the world's largest storage management and security vendors into a single entity that will take the storage industry in a completely new direction.
Bruce Lakin, ANZ managing director of Veritas, says the merger-which will unite the companies under a banner he calls 'information integrity'-will give storage management the security credentials needed to properly support business goals such as governance and ILM, which require careful control over information access and integrity.
"We've gone through a phase of being able to convince the market that, by using technology like Veritas' software, they can better utilise their storage resources and save on hardware purchase dollars," he says. "Now it's about automating that process. [Merging with Symantec] is the blending of our automation tools with Symantec's detection capabilities, which can give an instantaneous response to a threat."
Although the merged company will be known as Symantec rather than Veritas, Symantec by no means holds all the cards: the company has not played in the storage space in the past, and will be getting up to speed in this new space. That may force it into a steep learning curve against the likes of Computer Associates, which has long had business units handling both security and storage management.
Other storage vendors, however, pose less of a threat to Symantec, which drove consolidation through the security industry in a spate of acquisitions that competing storage players will find hard to replicate. Even McAfee, Symantec's closest competitor in the security space, lacks the breadth of product to compete with Symantec. This could put the combined company in a strong position against storage management competitors EMC, HP, and IBM.
HDS, Network Appliance, and Sun Microsystems, the other leading storage players, retain their mainly hardware focus-even in the wake of Sun's US$4.1 billion buyout of StorageTek. That deal gives hardware-focused Sun access to hardware-focused StorageTek's recently announced IntelliStore archiving solution, but lacks the security, flexible content management and other storage elements that the combined Veritas-Symantec deal will provide.
Ian Selway, marketing manager for ILM with HP, concedes that it can be hard keeping up with the Joneses and says market strength will come from building partnerships with established vendors in other areas, rather than acquiring small companies in a bid to be an all-singing, all-dancing storage provider. In September, HP, for example, launched its high-end StorageWorks XP12000 array as a rebadged version of Hitachi's TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform.
"I would challenge anyone within the industry to name one company in any part of IT that says they own all of their technology," says Selway. "The reality is that no matter who you are and how much you spend on R&D, you also OEM. The HP brand is not so much about the technology, but about things like brand, reputation, and the global capability that a company like HP has. At the end of the day, it comes down to offering customers a solution."
The new storage company
With its continuing focus on acquisitions and new functionality, EMC appears to be trying to become the storage world's equivalent of Cisco Systems, which beat out its customers through a process of relentless acquisition and innovation.
Seeking to add more intelligence into its core platform, EMC recently released its EMC Smarts MPLS Manager, which helps it manage multi-protocol label switching compliant virtual private networks.
MPLS, which lets telecommunications carriers offer guaranteed quality of service across their networks, may well be relevant to a world in which SAN-IP bridging technologies have allowed customers to extend SANs across carrier networks.
However, EMC's excursion into telecoms management may also be a harbinger of new things to come: as SANs become increasingly fluid, their future will be intimately linked with the capabilities of the networks on which they run. Could an EMC merger with Cisco or Juniper Networks be far behind?
Increasing polarisation of the storage market will force smaller players to find new ways to differentiate themselves, and to expand into new markets. SAN switch vendor Brocade, for example, recently debuted its Tapestry hardware and software framework for dynamically provisioning and activating application resources; also launched was the Brocade Tapestry Wide Area File Services (WAFS), a distributed file system designed to extend Windows network domains across distances via wide area network.
Still other companies have struck partnerships with application vendors to improve performance in specific environments. Network Appliance, for one, has partnered with SAP to tightly integrate virtualisation and other storage management technologies with the SAP NetWeaver platform. EMC recently forged a similar deal with SAP that has tightly integrated Documentum and DatabaseXtender with the SAP environment.
Judging by recent announcements, today's storage providers are strategically focused on deepening their involvement with enterprise content-a never-ending pool of opportunity when it comes to product development. Customers' increasingly sophisticated storage demands have brought issues such as management, rapid provisioning, fault detection and remediation, and ILM to the forefront-demanding new thinking from companies whose worries used to stop at the hard drive. And whether they build it or buy it, storage vendors' ability to innovate in new directions will be critical to their continued success.
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