STORAGE - The filing squad
Storage is fast becoming a lucrative market with companies keen to enter the area to gain a slice of the action and reap the rewards of its growth.
Up until the 1980s, storage devices in general and disk drives ino enter the area to gain a slice of the action and reap the rewards of its growth. particular, were categorised, almost dismissively, along with printers, keyboards and monitors, as 'peripheral devices'.
But that situation is changing rapidly as storage assumes a more critical role in the IT world and as more companies enter what they see as being a growing and lucrative market.
Data storage has always been recognised as necessary, but the selection of product and the management of a storage sub-system was not deemed as vital as the choice of processor and associated software.
The fact that the original IBM PC was launched in 1981 without a hard drive attached, gives some indication of the importance of storage in the minds of the hardware suppliers.
The situation began to change almost immediately as PC users demanded a hard drive on their machines. But in the past two years, the number of companies entering the storage area and the importance which the existing players attach to the market has increased immensely.
Sun Microsystems acquired storage manufacturer Encore, declaring that it intended to become a significant player in the field. Data General, once an important mini-computer supplier now fallen on hard times, has also switched its attention to the storage market. EMC, the company that challenged IBM's dominance in the mainframe storage world and won, let it be known that it would be looking to broaden its horizons into the open systems world.
The demand for greater capacity storage increases year on year. In 1995, IBM estimated that the average volume of data on a workstation would grow from 40Mb in 1991 to 70Mb in 1997. These figures may well prove to be an underestimation as operating systems, applications and online services via the internet or intranet occupy more storage space. Multimedia applications, data warehousing and electronic business, all being pushed with various degrees of intensity by any number of suppliers, will also accelerate the demand for storage devices.
Industry pundits agree that storage devices are no longer peripheral products, and for many resellers and users, they have become a strategic purchase rather than a value-added item. According to Jason Rabbetts, business unit manager for storage products at distributor Ideal Hardware, demand will increase dramatically in the future and storage has now become a strategic purchase.
'What you used to see was PC users selecting the best-of-breed processor and not worrying too much about storage. The attitude used to be, give me the top of the range processor and bung in 50 gigs of storage without the buyer realising that the "bung in" bit could amount to 50 to 60 per cent of the purchase price,' says Rabbetts.
He also detects other changes in the PC purchasers of storage products.
As the machines become more powerful and operating systems such as NT become more sophisticated, the corporate customers are shifting more business critical applications from the larger machines to the smaller Wintel systems.
As the PC networks take on more important applications, so there is an increased demand for storage management and security products that would previously have been unknown in the PC world.
Rabbetts says: 'As the demand for storage has grown from customers, a lot of the software vendors have started coming out with highly developed storage management products. It is fantastic to hear people in the PC world talking about capacity planning, I/O management and tuning, clustering and fault tolerance. There has also been a big increase in demand for security products.'
In the mainframe and mid-range environment, storage management tools have long been taken for granted, but are only now filtering into the PC world, thanks to the efforts of companies such as Computer Associates, Legato and Veritas. It has been a long and slow process of education.
Three years ago, Ivor Morgan, marketing manager for Memorex Telex, was warning users about the precipitous shift of critical applications to PC-based networks.
Speaking at the 1995 UK CMG conference, Morgan told delegates: 'Many of the tools and techniques found in host mainframe environments are being translated to network systems. Until organisations gain effective and efficient control of the data held on their network - that is, they establish the right base for business - they should not take the risk of implementing new age systems.'
One of the solutions recommended by Morgan is hierarchical storage management (HSM), which is drawn from the mainframe world and introduced in the mid-1980s. HSM works on the principle of balancing the cost of storage and retrieval against the speed of access required.
In an HSM environment, data which is retrieved on an hourly basis, for example, would be stored in an online environment on a fast disk drive.
Data retrieved less regularly, though still fairly frequently, would be stored near-line on a dedicated cache disk. Data required sporadically would use an optical disk jukebox or magnetic tape mounted in a library.
The final category, off-line storage such as archive documents would be stored on magnetic disks and held in a secure environment such as a vault and retrieved if necessary. It would be mounted manually.
Although HSM was a marvellous idea in theory, there were some problems with implementation and management. But at least one sector of the industry was thinking of the cost and performance issues related to storage.
As little as three years ago, such innovative thinking would scarcely be considered by PC users and administrators. But today, according to some storage suppliers, HSM is already outdated.
Mike Maunder, marketing director at EMC, believes that HSM is past its prime. 'A lot of the benefits HSM could deliver are now incorporated in the storage devices themselves,' he says. The latest trend to hit the storage market is the storage area network (SAN), which is being pushed by Sun in particular and by IBM to a lesser extent. It has been adopted by other suppliers, including EMC, somewhat reluctantly.
SAN is based around fibre channel technology that permits faster access to stored data and enables the storage sub-systems to be located a few kilometres from the processor.
In June, EMC announced the availability of a fibre channel network hub for its Symmetrix enterprise storage systems and, in so doing, endorsed SAN. EMC had initially been cool on the SAN concept since it was being pushed most heavily by Sun, its closest rival in the large systems storage market. But a move that surprised many observers was EMC's announcement of support at hub level for Sun and Hewlett Packard servers, both of which run different versions of Unix. In recent months, EMC has been trumpeting its close alliance with Microsoft and its support for NT. The company also has agreements with other Unix suppliers, including Sequent and NCR.
EMC's decision to support Sun's Unix offering, Solaris, is important in two respects. On the first count, it means EMC recognises that SAN is a viable concept and Sun represents a threat in the storage area. Secondly, according to some analysts, the EMC announcement puts it ahead of its rival in the SAN race. EMC has partnership agreements with a number of companies, including HP, to provide their storage requirements. But its decision to support the Sun platform is a sign that EMC recognises the importance of the Sun-installed base and is determined to fight back.
The demand for a SAN system is coming from users, according to Chris Atkins, storage marketing manager at Sun. 'There is a big push back from the large users who are saying, not another storage disk drive not another tape drive, every time another product is launched.' EMC's Maunder agrees.
Many users are demanding a single storage system from the mainframe server, through their Unix processors and down to the desktop systems, he claims.
To some extent, Sun, EMC, IBM and others are moving toward data sharing storage devices, he adds: 'The big issue in the data centre operations is LAN server consolidation. Data centre managers are now looking at how many servers they have and how to reduce the number.
'One of the main drivers in the data centre is you can start to share files in a limited way - for example, DB2 and Microsoft exchange on the same device without having to reformat or worry about security or corruption of data,' Maunder says.
For Sun, whose original marketing and advertising slogan was, 'the network is the computer,' the drive into the storage arena makes a great deal of sense.
But both Sun and EMC agree that full data sharing storage across all platforms is still some way away. 'SAN has traditionally been a hardware issue. Lots of companies can deliver the hardware, but the problem lies with the software to move the data around which is not yet there,' says Maunder.
Even in the early 1990s, data centre storage accounted for almost 50 per cent of the IT budget and has been rising ever since. The software tools have been around for more than a decade and the data centre staff imbued with a culture that recognised the importance of storage management.
In many of the larger data centres there were storage management professionals whose sole task was to select the hardware and software system necessary as well as managing storage across a variety of platforms.
According to the resellers and suppliers, storage is now assuming a growing importance in smaller LAN installations. Ideal's Rabbetts points to the growing take-up of automated tape libraries, which has long been a feature of mainframe storage in the PC world.
But the importance of even the simple end-of-day back-up of data has often been relegated to junior employees and sometimes forgotten altogether.
One of the things that both the smaller LAN users and the resellers will have to adopt, as well as the mainframe style tools, is mainframe style discipline.
Sun's Atkins admits that the tools available in the LAN storage world have still some way to go before they reach maturity but argues that the technology is moving ahead. 'If you look at what is available today, SAN is not nearly as good as what is available in the mainframe environment.
But if you come from the PC world, it is better than anything ever seen in the past,' he says.
Over the years, there have been a number of individual factors which have dictated which machine was purchased and for what purpose. In addition to the normal selection criteria of price and performance during the 1960s and 1970s, systems were purchased on the basis of the manufacturer's name and reputation. Later, the OS became the key component in purchasing followed by the type of database that would run on the machine. The final stage was where the type of application represented the key factor in hardware procurement.
None of these individual components was exclusively responsible for influencing a buyer's decision but each, at one time or another, was the decisive factor.
Until now, storage has been seen as important but not critical in the purchasing cycle, but that looks as if it is set to change. The disk and tape drives, once dismissed as peripheral devices, may now be the deciding factor in system purchasing. The manufacturers are aware of the importance of storage, the ISVs are working to develop the management software necessary to take the PC LAN into the world of business-critical computing and the dealers should be gearing up to meet the demand for storage sub-systems that is about to arrive.