The mood was surprisingly optimistic at storage show SNW Europe in Frankfurt recently, as exhibitors, presenters, users and the channel rallied to suggest new ways of consolidating storage for customers on a tight budget.

This year, the two-and-a-half day show attracted about 1,000 delegates, including end users, resellers, analysts and members of the media, a little down compared with last year’s figures.

SNW Europe welcomed about 1,400 visitors from 24 EMEA nations and some from as far afield as Japan and the US.
During analyst IDC’s storage market update, Nick Sundby, consulting director for IDC’s European Storage Group, discussed the second wave of green IT as an option for businesses struggling to justify their IT spending.

“The next wave of green IT will be about understanding the problem of rising power costs.”
Sundby said that businesses will by law, from October 2009, have to submit data from their bills and explain their carbon footprints.

“This creates a public relations incentive for businesses to cut down on carbon emissions as the government will publish the results,” he added.
At the show, storage vendor NetApp announced deduplication on its virtual tape library (VTL) systems. This technology can help customers lower the disk capacity required to back up any storage system by up to 95 per cent, the company claimed. That remains true even if the storage kit is by HP or EMC, NetApp said.

John Rollason, product marketing manager at NetApp, said about 16,000 NetApp systems have been deployed with deduplication by some 3,500 customers, so far.

Delivering deduplication
“It is our aim for 100 per cent of NetApp systems to eventually be running deduplication technology. NetApp has a guarantee that it will use 50 per cent less storage with its deduplication – ­ if it does not it will ship more storage,” he said.
Andy Norman, chief operating officer of Glasshouse Technologies, said analysts have suggested that storage will be re-engineered throughout 2009.

Glasshouse gave two presentations for the attendees of SNW Europe, the first was called: Re-engineering Storage – ­ What does on demand really mean and how do you deliver it?

In the presentation, Norman discussed the issue of storage consumers having adopted a model of “fill ‘er up” when they make a storage request ­ – preferring to have spare capacity into which they can grow, rather than risk that a future request might be denied because of budget constraints or response time.

“By building out the frame in a fully populated configuration at the start, it is a simple matter of turning on the next collection of drives. Despite the on-demand model for storage, few firms can yet determine the difference between how much storage they own, how much is allocated and how much is used,” said Norman.

“Due to cost pressures, outsourcing will become popular in a bid to reduce spending, but that storage has to be managed
efficiently. It is common to find a customer that is wasting storage yet continuing to buy more.”

In the other presentation: Great Expectations: Are you Seeing the Real Benefits of Virtualisation? Norman said users that deploy virtualisation solutions are not receiving the return on investment they anticipated and are struggling to manage the environment.

Technology showcase
“Most businesses have virtualised servers now. However, projects tend to slow down because people do not know how to manage virtual environments,” he added.

“Customers need management and administration processes in place to get the most out of their virtual environments. Glasshouse is about getting more out of less from the services we offer.”

Dr Helmut Beck, vice president of storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC), said: “SNW Europe is, and remains, an
important show, especially in the current economic climate.

“Storage growth comes from unstructured data with richer and bigger content. The economy may be tough at the moment, but there are new technologies out there which can help solve this.”

Beck highlighted the fact that many businesses have put a freeze on recruitment.
“Because many firms are looking for ways to free up more time for their existing workforce instead of employing more staff, businesses should look at defining their infrastructures, the option of outsourcing and services,” he said.

Vendor Emulex gave a presentation on its new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) portfolio.

Craig Skelton, director of channel sales for EMEA at Emulex, was keen to assure the channel that all products will be integrated into the partner programme and that full training will be provided.

“FCoE opens up opportunities for partners, so Emulex will be engaging with its channel to ensure it is up to speed on how to take these products to market,” he said.
QLogic’s presence caused a stir among the attendees, showing its FCoE products live from the stand.
Henrik Hansen, EMEA marketing director at QLogic, said: “The attendees at the show were certainly keen to unravel the latest storage and data networking topics.

“Clearly FCoE was high on their agenda. On the QLogic stand and in the SNW tutorial, we were able to discuss the options that are available to datacentre managers.”

Converging futures
The options can typically include up to three fabrics: Ethernet for LAN, fibre channel for the storage area network (SAN)
and InfiniBand, which is for high-performance clusters.

“Attendees and partners actively wanted to understand how SAN and LAN will evolve and converge over the next five years and how they can adopt enhanced Ethernet and FCoE to satisfy convergence within next-generation datacentres,” added Hansen.

QLogic also announced collaboration with Cisco to offer open standards-based host to fabric virtualisation technology, allowing users to attain quality of service (QoS) through Cisco virtual SAN (VSAN).

“QLogic HBA [SAN] integration with Cisco VSANs provides storage administrators with an industry-standard method for improving SAN security, scalability and performance by segmenting physical SANs into multiple virtual SANs,” said Hansen.