PERSPECTIVES - Reseller viewpoint

It's time resellers considered disk drives as more than just another point on a spec list and took a serious look at incoming technologies.

Storage products are not something many resellers can honestly sayer point on a spec list and took a serious look at incoming technologies. they've ever tried to sell. Most of the time, the storage is just the disk that comes in the desktop or server box - just a capacity point on a spec list.

But the latest developments in the market promise to change that perception and position - network-attached storage, fibre channel, storage area networking (San) and storage management concepts are all emerging on the industry standard platform as organisations put more essential data onto disk drives inside industry-standard servers.

There are opportunities emerging behind the technologies, but resellers are not easily persuaded to commit themselves before users show enthusiasm.

Persuading resellers to take a chance in the storage market isn't easy, says Donal Madden, UK storage products manager at Compaq Storageworks.

Compaq introduced its fibre channel products six months ago and received a good response from the market. But the vendor experienced problems persuading resellers to commit to educating themselves about the products in advance. 'Resellers have heard it all before and they want to see there's a market there before they start to invest in it.'

Compaq claims to have installed 120Tb of fibre channel storage systems since the launch, but warns that there's a price to pay in taking such opportunities. 'We have always tried to make things simpler and keep consistency between the installation and management. Inevitably, there will be some complexity and the channel will have to invest in the skills it needs,' Madden explains.

But not all resellers are difficult to persuade. Bytes Technology Group, for example, is more than convinced of the opportunities offered by the growing awareness of storage as an essential part of the overall system.

James Byrne, a storage specialist at Bytes, says the advances that vendors have made with storage technology over the past few months are beginning to have an effect and are making larger companies in particular more aware of how profoundly the storage system can affect the whole performance of the system.

'We are starting to see a shift in the market towards server consolidation and so, storage consolidation,' he says. 'More customers are starting to realise the value fibre channel can bring to their business, not just from a performance standpoint, but also from the cost of ownership perspective.'

Many storage manufacturers have managed to get to grips with the problems of sharing data across different drives, Byrne adds, and this gives users a better return on their investment. They are also starting to look at Sans seriously.

'There's a great opportunity within the market to be able to consult on, design and install Sans. Many customers are moving to Gigabit Ethernet networks, which run at the same speed as fibre channel storage, because there's no point in implementing a fast network if there's bottleneck when accessing data.'

Graham Norbury, business development manager for storage products at Tplc, is equally enthusiastic. He says the past 18 months have seen enormous growth in the market. 'The requirement to store more data online is a growing necessity. Today's customers are realising that a sound storage strategy is essential to the well-being of their businesses, allowing them to manage more storage with less staff and greater guaranteed uptime.'

But it is no longer enough to sell only the standard server-attached drives, he warns. 'SCSI-attached storage is becoming a commodity item that does not provide the flexibility and cost of ownership being demanded. This is resulting in a more aggressive market, declining margins and more competition to the server vendors' single system.'

Norbury believes storage area networking will open up more valuable opportunities.

'Key vendors are developing products for the San and providing the products for resellers to offer value added business packages and services'

He adds that storage will continue to be a growing opportunity for resellers over the next few years - and that no reseller will be excluded from the market, even if they are only selling basic drives - both for those that continue to sell on a commodity basis and those that wish to add value.

'While there will continue to be a decline in the commodity-based margins, those resellers that add value will see substantial and continued growth in their business and profitability,' Norbury predicts.

In the systems builder market, the business is all about basic, reliable, low-cost drives. Michael Flannagan, general manager of product development and quality at Time Computers, says there's plenty of choice in the disk drive market but not many vendors that can meet the needs of his firm.

'Only a couple have the capability of delivering what we require,' he claims. 'There are price and volume issues, of course, but also the introduction of products and reliability to consider. There are only a couple of suppliers that can deliver across the whole range of requirements. In the desktop sector, those vendors are Seagate and Fujitsu, and Toshiba in notebooks.'

For Time, high capacity and value are all important. The more disk space it can advertise at a low price, the more attractive it's products appear to the target market. This price-driven formula is repeated across the mail-order, off-the-page and retail sectors, and is likely to continue to drive the volume disk producers to increase capacity, decrease prices and improve their time to market.

Delivering higher capacities faster is absolutely vital, says Flannagan.

Drive vendors that fall behind are at a distinct disadvantage - a three-month wait to catch up would be unacceptable.

What this means for the channel is that the after-market service is likely to decline. With capacities rising, few users will need an additional disk drive or an upgrade with the machine they purchase for use in the home.

MANAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Chris Boorman, European marketing director of storage management developer Veritas Software, says storage management is a huge opportunity.

'It is more than just disks and backup now - its backup, HSM, storage resource management, and is related to core functions such as disk management, file systems and clustering.'

Gartner Group estimates that the worldwide market for storage management applications will grow to $5.5 billion by year 2002. Veritas is the leading player at the moment. It recently bought the network management software business of Seagate Software and by end of this year expects to have sold more than $600 million worth of storage management software.

The opportunity is arising, says Boorman, out of the dependency businesses now have on computers and their storage. 'We are addicted to our computers. We cannot do without them. Keeping the information at our fingertips is an issue and storage management helps to achieve this by looking after the access paths into the data.

'We do backups to restore data when we have lost it, for whatever reason. We use sophisticated disk management and file systems to enable us to re-configure our computers without taking them offline. We do clustering to ensure that the access path into the data is never lost. We try to catch errors before they become disasters.'

Every hardware vendor is trying to position themselves in the software market as well as in the hard disk business, but players need specialists to get the job done properly, claims Boorman.

'Customers live in a heterogeneous environment. They have a mixture of different hardware configurations, each with their own capabilities and characteristics. It is only an independent software vendor that can link all these systems together and enable the customer to get maximum benefit out of their hardware infrastructure.'

IS TAPE DYING?

Tape has been under pressure for years from alternative technologies and some of these, such as CD-RW, seem to be getting a real foothold in the market. But tape vendors remain undaunted. Bill Greenfield, vice president and managing director of European Operations at software storage systems provider Storage Computer, claims tape has plenty of life in it yet.

'Tape will probably never die. Every time disk and optical drives come close to matching tape's cost per Mb advantage, someone brings out another generation that takes another quantum leap ahead,' he says. 'As a low cost backup and archiving medium, tape is still the most cost effective method because it is an inexpensive transport mechanism for large amounts of data. And who in their right mind is going to pull an expensive disk out of a Raid system and shove it in a vault for years on end?'

Herve Petit, managing director of storage systems developer LaCie, also sees a future for tape. 'CD-R and DVD are not a threat to tape, but a useful alternative. Magneto-optical drives CDR, CD-RW and DVD-Ram are great technologies that open up the market for archiving. Their future is bright with one-man bands, laptop users, IT managers who need to travel, and users who need an adaptable removable media,' he says.

Steve Georgis, director of technology and business development at Exabyte, believes low-end removable technologies such as Zip, Jaz and DVD will eventually supplant tape on the desktop. 'This has actually been happening for some time now. Low-end QIC and Travan tape products have seen declining sales in recent years. This is the reason why Exabyte chose to exit the desktop tape market several years ago.'

But in the server market, tape will not be replaced by competing technologies in the foreseeable future for three reasons, he says - storage capacity, data transfer rates and cost. 'The typical low-end server now has about 20Gb of online data that needs daily backup. There are no available technologies other than tape that can provide this - DVD is only 4.7Gb, Jaz is 2Gb.

'The next generation of tape drives will begin shipping later this year offering data rates that are between five and 10 times faster than drives such as DVD. In today's networked world, many systems must run 24x7. This creates an ever shrinking window in which to do backup. A growing capacity and shrinking backup time means users need the fastest backup media available. That will continue to be tape for the foreseeable future,' says Georgis.

'Finally, tape still offers the lowest cost backup media. A typical tape cost is between $2 and $4 per Gb, compared to $50 to $75 for disk-based media such as Zip or Jaz.'

He doesn't see LTO as a significant threat at this stage. 'LTO is a 100Gb format designed to compete primarily with Super-DLT at the high-end of open-systems backup. While it is likely to steal some market share from DLT since two of its developers, Hewlett Packard and IBM, are leading systems vendors themselves, it is not likely to have a huge impact as long as Super-DLT is delivered.'