Storage World 2004

Set to take place once again at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, and running in tandem with Information Security World and Email Management World, this year's Storage World conference and exhibition promises to be the biggest yet. Here, IDM opens the floor up to the leading exhibitors to share their thoughts on the upcoming event and what they consider to be the main issues shaping the storage industry.

IDM: What can delegates expect to hear about from you at this year's event?

IBM: In the demonstration booths we'll be looking at the major new on-demand technologies IBM has recently introduced - storage virtualisation technologies designed to help our clients simply their IT infrastructures, as well as our new data and content management offerings.
In the sessions themselves we'll be talking about these on-demand technologies and going into more detail. We will also be looking to hear back from delegates on the storage issues concerning them at the moment.

HP: HP will be providing consulting and solutions information around our ILM offering, security products and storage services. Specifically related to Storage World, HP will be demonstrating its services and support capabilities including analysis, design, management and evolution of customers' storage environments to allow them to embrace ILM offerings whilst managing their existing storage infrastructure. HP specialists will be on hand to discuss new services and products announced by HP.

Sony: Sony Australia will launch AIT-4, the fourth generation of its Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT). We will also show ProData, the new blue laser-based technology for optical drives, rewritable and WORM media.

Computer Associates: At Storage World, we will be launching the latest release of our storage management solutions (under the BrightStor Brand). We are also releasing our email management solutions that address the complexity and issues of managing these business critical applications.

Apple: Earlier this year, Apple announced Xsan, an enterprise-class storage networking solution. Xsan lets multiple computers concurrently access terabytes of storage on Xserve RAID over high-speed Fibre Channel. As a 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X Panther, Xsan lets you share files and volumes up to 16TB in size. Up to 64 systems on the storage area network (SAN) can read and write to shared storage simultaneously. Apple will preview Xsan at Storage World 2004.

Sun: Sun will be making three major announcements at Storage World:

• The launch of the Sun StorEdge, 6920 which intelligently links storage with specific software applications.
• New offerings specifically tailored to the SMB market.
• Two new partnerships with independent software vendors.

Digistor: Digistor will be showcasing products that address a range of storage requirements for delegates attending this year's Storage World. Attendees will be able to see the latest range of RAID storage subsystems from Infortrend, including SCSI and Fibre units, all of which are available with support for SATA, FC or SCSI disks, making them suitable for a wide range of requirements. ATTO's new range of Celerity FC HBA's will also be on display. Also on show will be the Ultera disk-to-disk backup solution.

ASI Solutions: New technologies including iSCSI storage networking, disk based backup, snapshot enhanced backup and replication for Microsoft Exchange 2003, leveraging Microsoft's new VSS capabilities.

SLI-Consulting: New products include a data storage enclosure, a 300 GB Enterprise hard drive integration, a 400 GB SATA HDD drive integration, and FC-SATA with a form factor of 199 TB/m3.

We will also be talking about data centre consolidation at the national hospital in Ilsan/Korea, and effective use of rack optimised and blades servers in the Australian Post Production industry.

KVS: During the past 12 months archiving has developed into a separate market and the customer demands have increased significantly beyond basic email archiving. KVS will be discussing our archiving framework and how a fully modular and expandable system like Enterprise Vault can provide value to the whole organisation and how an enterprise archiving solution enables organisations to commence an Information Lifecycle Management process. An ILM process needs to be broken in to achievable tasks and KVS offers simple easy way to start this.

IDM: What do you think is the most important issue affecting the storage industry that needs to be addressed at the present time?

CA: Technology people in general see the growth in data as just something that happens rather than the output of business growth.

The norm in the industry today is to store data and protect data. Any change to these elements is typically addressed by throwing technology at the issue. Until you understand the data, you CAN NOT, attribute any business value to the data or the need impact around the data. Basically until you make the leap from "we just back it up and store it", to "what does the business do with this data" you haven't addressed the management requirements to their fullest. It really is a discussion around Managing Technology verses Managing Business Need.

Managing data growth is not the same as managing storage growth, we need to look for and use the answers to the Who, Why, What and When, this will move us from a reactive position to a proactive position. So the most important issue affecting the storage industry is the need to shake off the shackles of having only a technology view of the world and embrace the value of aligning with and understand the business need to better enable management of our data environment.

SLI-Consulting: Data Life Cycle management, security, consolidation and human resources.

According to a recent report published by people3, a Gartner company-CIOs and IT leaders must continue to be in the forefront of cost-containment efforts for organisations, but for long-term success these IT executive teams must demonstrate their competencies in driving business transformation to be considered successful leaders.

"Historically, CIOs and IT executives were strong on management and weak on leadership, due in part to the fact that many IT organisations operated as transaction processors in serving the operational needs of the business," said Lily Mok, senior consultant at people3 . "Although they were labelled as leaders, they were not actually 'leading' but instead 'managing.' Changes must start from within the IT leadership as IT migrates from a traditional, reactive-based organisation to a new proactive, strategic and consultative operating environment."

"IT leaders need to be mindful that having a strong technical background does not warrant effectiveness in IT leadership," Mok said. "IT leaders must focus more on running IT like a business and on developing their business and behavioural competencies."

Leadership competencies can be learned through a set of experiences, and leaders that excel in their roles are good learners.

"IT organisations need to establish processes that help current and potential leaders understand what the organisation expects and create plans for improvement," Mok said.

IBM: Infrastructure simplification. As we all know, the last few years have seen an almost exponential growth in installed disk storage capacity in most organisations. This has been coupled with a movement away from direct attached storage to networked storage, be it SAN or NAS. This has resulted in the ever increasing complexity of the storage management environment.

How to manage the storage infrastructure has become a key issue for client's IT departments. Storage networking has helped control these booming storage requirements by detaching storage devices from individual applications and providing centralised control. And SANs have enabled physical pooling of storage and servers via switches, but physical pooling is not enough to exploit the real TCO savings.

But the popularity, diversity and size of SANs themselves have presented IT managers with new issues of manageability, such as increasing numbers of pooled arrays and growing variety of storage controllers.

Virtualisation is the 'third act' of storage networking. It promises to address that increased complexity by shifting storage management intelligence from individual SAN controllers into the network via a virtualisation engine.

The objective is to provide a block level view of storage resources within the storage network so that available capacity on disparate storage devices can be viewed and managed as a single entity.

The storage industry is moving past "tipping point" of shifting to open standards, time when customers realise real benefits of improved productivity and cost savings with storage products that are interoperable and manageable across vendors and platforms.

KVS: The whole concept of providing Information Lifecycle Management has been promoted as a simple task for most organisations and can be achieved easily through the purchase of varying storage systems. The reality for most organisations is that the process will take time to develop and needs to commence with an acceptance that certain areas such as determining compliance requirements need to be addressed sooner and will form a basis for an ILM strategy.

HP: Customers are telling us that their challenges come from the need to manage vast amounts of information, held in complex storage networks, whilst keeping it accessible on a real-time basis, and at the same time, keeping costs under control.

HP will show how we help solve our customers' issues, by reducing complexity, providing management control of the infrastructure, and aligning business processes with IT.

Digistor: Clearly the greatest challenge facing customers today is the exponential increase in storage requirements. This creates many challenges including how to effectively store this data, back it up and keep it secure, all while maintaining maximum availability of the data.

Apple: Storage requires a balancing act from IT Managers, who require the highest availability, quickest throughput and data protection, at the most affordable cost. To address this need, Apple has been promoting the idea of tiering storage. By breaking down storage needs into tiers such as 'Business Critical', Mission Critical', and 'Nearline/Archive' a business can apply the most appropriate storage to each tier and achieve the balance.

Sun: The automation of information management through its lifecycle-from the moment it is created until it is destroyed; ensuring the value of the information is reflected in the costs. This helps organisations to manage their budgets more effectively, with a truer view of the cost of their fluctuating storage requirements. I am also particularly interested in the emergence of next generation SAN technology, which puts storage management at the centre of the network. Finally, from a wider industry perspective, standards and interoperability are always a key driver or, indeed, inhibitor of storage technologies.

Sony: The demands for everyday storage, backup and archiving, combined with legal requirements, are not always reflected in the budgets and time allocated to sourcing and implementing suitable solutions.

IDM: What would constitute a successful Storage World for your company?

KVS: A major role KVS performs is to stimulate thought and educate organisations on the solutions available to commence and ILM and compliance process. The success of most industry events are long-term and therefore the immediate success will come from the level of questions raised by attendees which will indicate the maturity of our market. Further to this, the success would be measured by attendees understanding and accepting that existing tools cannot be used to meet new requirements such as archiving.

CA: To generate awareness that CA is more than just a storage vendor. Also, to educate attendees that Intelligent Storage Management is more about the 'Management' and less about the 'Storage'!

HP: Two days of useful interaction with customers to understand their needs and issues they face managing their storage environments.

Apple: A better understanding of Apple's enterprise offerings within the storage community. Those who have had the opportunity to experience Apple in multiples types of environments have reaped the benefits of affordable storage.

Sun: I guess the best result would be to increase awareness of the breadth and depth of Sun's storage products, from the small business to the enterprise, that assist Australian businesses to successfully manage and leverage one of their most valuable assets-their data.

Sony: Sony is expanding its range of storage solutions from small business to corporate and enterprise markets so channel representatives need to take away a greater appreciation of the Sony line-up strategy.

Digistor: A key objective for Digistor is to expose Digistor's range of solutions and expertise to as broad a range of customers as possible.

SLI-Consulting: Signing up two new partners!

IBM: IBM is the premium sponsor for StorageWorld, so in that respect, a successful StorageWorld is a success for IBM. Specifically though, our business is about helping organisations apply technology to business problems.

When we ask our clients about their storage priorities, two key issues invariably come up: The first is cost, especially in today's difficult economic climate, and the second is availability of data-to employees, customers and partners. So cost and availability, or business efficiency and business continuance, are what keep customers up at night.

Another major issue for customers is how to protect the large investment that they have made in existing technology. It is imperative that new solutions can coexist with and incorporate today's technology. While the focus is on business continuance and business efficiency, there are many issues to wrestle with along the way.

The ever increasing demand for storage causes complexity to grow-in terms of configuration, management, and processes and procedures. Storage technology continues to evolve and with this evolution comes a need for storage professionals to develop new and complex skills, thus adding to the cost of owning storage. As the technologies evolve, new choices are emerging-if we can help people attending the event to better understand the options that are now available to them, we'll consider Storage World a success.

Thanks to Wayne Glynne, manager, Storage, IBM Australia and New Zealand; Bjorn Englehardt, Asia Pacific regional director, KVS; Jacob van der Eyk, storage practice leader, Computer Associates; Peter Norman, marketing manager, business solutions division, Sony; Jose Goldmann, principal consulting, SLI-Consulting; Dean Nurscher, NSW sales manager, Digistor; Dan Kieran, Sun Microsystems; Ian Selway, marketing manager for StorageWorks, HP Australia; and Apple.

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