Change in store for IT market

The increasing knowledge of storage systems among end-users is set to change the storage marketplace considerably, writes Craig Nunes

Traditional storage vendors have been maintaining the status quo, much to the channel’s disadvantage, for a long time; resellers have lost

sales because vendors are pushing technologies that alienate prospects through high-costs. But end-users are now waking up to storage myths.

One of the most prevalent of these myths is that storage capacity requirements grow every year; that customers and the channel need to funnel capacity and resources into data centres. With traditional storage arrays, “used” capacity is only 25 per cent of the total allocated capacity – a monumental waste of disks, time and money.

But clever, new “utility storage” technologies such as thin provisioning enable capacity to be acquired and allocated only as needed, postponing purchases, leveraging falling drive prices and drastically improving utilisation rates. Thin copy snapshot technologies further reduce storage requirements by enabling incremental versus full back-ups. Not surprisingly, then, utility storage customers are reducing capacity and related costs by half or more.

Another storage myth is that managing storage is difficult. It has become accepted that it will take hours or days to provision capacity or share data. Maintaining adequate performance for applications is a full-time discipline. However, utility storage technologies can speed up provisioning and data sharing. Utility storage customers are reducing storage administration time by up to 90 per cent.

So where is the opportunity for the channel? First, the potential target market is larger because organisations can afford a storage strategy. Second, while capacity utilisation rates are improved, it is inevitable that end-users will require more storage capacity and they will rely on VARs to help them scale their storage infrastructure. Third, the savings realised through using utility storage can be directed towards other products.

IT administrators are becoming more knowledgeable and their awareness of new technologies is increasing. It is essential for the channel to be seen as a partner whose customers’ interests are highly important.

Resellers pushing capacity while attempting to mask poor utilisation rates will quickly be dropped in favour of those offering solutions that efficiently leverage existing resources by making them work smarter. The way for a reseller to be seen as a true partner is to help their customers debunk common storage myths by showing them how sometimes less is more. C

Craig Nunes is vice-president of marketing at 3PAR.