connecting with IP
The latest in a range of new storage technologies, IP promises good opportunities
The latest in a range of new storage technologies, IP promises good opportunities in the SME and mid-market for resellers that are able to exploit its advantages early in the game, writes Mark Ballard, in the second of a five-part series.
Storage connectivity presents a huge opportunity for resellers of all types. With a little more expertise they might be able to cash in at precisely the right time: the beginning of a growth period.
The pressure is on for the storage specialists since the arrival of storage over IP: storage devices accessed and managed over networks controlled by IP, the great equaliser. Storage has for a long time been a high-margin refuge for masters of the arcane arts, but IP may eventually bring an end to that.
Those most vulnerable to this competition are storage players that have grown complacent. Nigel Tozer, a principal storage consultant at Computer Associates, says he comes across at least two instances a month of storage resellers selling short and leaving their customers with systems that are within budget, but do only what was asked for and no more.
Three months down the line the customers invariably wish they had spent a little more when their storage needs outstrip the limits of the system. They end up asking Tozer why the original reseller had not persuaded them it would be prudent to spend a little more money.
Some storage resellers may be tired and unimaginative, but they are still earning good margins of 15 points and above. Storage over IP is a relatively new technology, and new wheezes usually take longer to become established than their marketers would have you believe. Vendors of IP storage technology claim that IP will change the face of the storage industry. Vendors of incumbent technologies will tell you otherwise.
John Greenwood, international product marketing manager at storage reseller NCE, sides with the IP supporters. “It is changing the way people think about storage,” he says.
In the past 18 months the share of NCE’s revenue derived from IP storage systems has leapt from less than 10 to more than 40 per cent.
The SME market is a prime target for networked storage for the same reasons that it offers opportunities for network resellers. It is affordable and easy to manage by a combination of network engineers and storage experts providing support or training.
Networked storage can bring the same benefits of adaptability to an SME’s storage as it does to the corporate and upper end of the mid-market. The only problem is that Fibre Channel, the connectivity technology used for most storage networks, is expensive.
Storage over IP can achieve the same effect as Fibre Channel in a storage network. Although performance is lower, it is still powerful enough to impress everyone except corporate data centre eggheads. It is also affordable for small firms.
Greenwood says the technology has also opened doors in the public sector. Like SMEs, local authorities, educators and the NHS have found not only that Fibre Channel connections are expensive, but also that their existing direct-attached storage (DAS) is becoming unmanageable and failing to meet their growing needs.
But no connectivity – not even IP – is exciting enough to those not versed in alchemy to be sold on the strength of the technology alone. Frank Berry, vice-president of worldwide marketing at QLogic, says: “Customers don’t find storage connectivity – or plumbing – terribly relevant. Did you care what type of piping your plumber used when he built your bathroom?”
That is one reason why the uptake of IP storage is growing slowly, says Berry. But when a system is sold, the underlying technology is the choice of the reseller. As far as the customer is concerned, storage has to be a solution sale like any other, says Chris Hyrne, vice-president of marketing at data replication vendor Topio.
“Business and regulatory issues define the service levels that IT needs to provide,” he says. “Technologies that improve availability, data protection and recovery performance are all near the top of the food chain. Interconnect is well down.”
One approach adopted by some resellers is the disaster recovery sale. Corporate firms were chided after the 11 September attacks for having
non-existent or inadequate disaster recovery arrangements in place to protect their data and computer systems. Many put up their hands and said the costs were too great. Paul Talbut, chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association, says IP has made it more feasible
for businesses, even in the mid-market, to take precautions to protect their data.
“Long-distance replication for example, is a hot area. Organisations want to ensure that in case of disaster, natural or otherwise, they have a copy of their data safely stored away from the primary site,” he says.
But IP will open only so many doors. The SME market, promising as it looks to vendors in all sectors of the IT industry, is still largely untilled. The corporate market, meanwhile, is still mostly toying with IP.
Steve Mackey, director of product marketing at storage vendor ADIC, confirms that take-up of IP storage has not been as widespread as predicted. “It may still happen, but it is certainly not yet mainstream,” he says.
Fibre Channel is king of the corporate space, and some say it is not threatened by IP. Woody Hutsell, vice-president of disk vendor Texas Memory Systems, says: “Fibre Channel is still the logical choice for the data centre and mission critical applications that require high performance.”
However, he adds, iSCSI the storage-over-IP networking protocol, is being used by corporates to connect islands of SANs, especially over long distances where other methods are either not practical or too expensive.
So it is still horses for courses. According to Hutsell, this makes it all the more important for resellers selling storage into the corporate space to be able to deal with a variety of situations so that they can fit the right connectivity option to the right problem.
“Limiting customer options to any one protocol will limit return on investment and increase the total cost of ownership,” he adds.
Yet Hutsell’s ideal would be demanding for any reseller to attain. Paul Hickingbotham, solutions manager at storage distributor Hammer, points to the constantly shifting sands of the storage industry, with sales portfolios changing rapidly as new technologies are introduced. Smaller resellers find it particularly hard to keep up, he says, but by limiting their scope they can manage.
“By setting up as a niche VAR, the smaller reseller can earn higher margins, thanks to its valued-added knowledge of a specific market,” says Hickingbotham.
“Once a reseller becomes perceived as an expert in a particular market segment, it becomes easier to cross over into a similar vertical market. It can use a ‘slowly, slowly’ approach to vertical markets to increase margin potential and turnover.”
One opportunity for resellers is the continued migration of customers in both the corporate and SME sectors from DAS to SAN. Contrary to popular opinion, network storage is still only an upstart. DAS is still dominant, even if its crown has slipped a little.
“For a one- or two-server company DAS is cheap, it is tried and tested and it requires little specialist knowledge,” says Tozer.
“But the winning formula for growing companies is to move to flexible storage sooner rather than later. It is here that DAS needs to be reconsidered. I deal with many organisations that have more than 50 servers with a tape on each of them. The management of this costs a fortune.”
As DAS is replaced by SANs, customers need to have their hands held through the migration so they do not lose any valuable data, says Hyrne.
According to some, IP is gaining favour as the technology to be used after old DAS systems are ripped out. That means IP storage resellers will be able to sell their solutions into growth areas of both the mid and corporate markets.
Russ Johnson, general manager and vice-president of Adaptec Europe, says: “Resellers are finding that larger organisations recognise that IP storage solutions can complement and extend their existing SAN environments, or provide affordable new SAN storage solutions in parts of the IT infrastructure still dominated by direct-attached storage.”
The other significant perceived battle line is between NAS and SAN, but the fight is not as violent as is often thought, according to Hutsell.
“The fact that most NAS vendors now connect their filers to storage via SANs is blurring the lines between the technologies,” he says.
Each technology has its natural home. SAN, which is more expensive, is favoured for databases while NAS is preferred for file sharing and clustered servers. However, the distinctions between the technologies are blurring.
“In the real world users often deploy all of these technologies simultaneously,” Talbut says. “It’s no longer a case of end-users choosing NAS over SAN or the other way round. Applications work in different ways and all data is not equal. So sometimes NAS is more suitable, other times SAN is the best way forward.”
To confuse matters even further, software that manages storage assets in a virtual space is more widely used. As the software does not distinguish between storage technologies, what is underneath is not a cause for concern, as long as it works well.
So if you get down to SAN or NAS, NAS or DAS, Fibre Channel or iSCSI, serial-attached SCSI or serial ATA, and other fine, technological distinctions too convoluted to explore here, then it becomes clear just how safe the storage specialists are in their corporate enclave.
IP will undoubtedly wash through the market, and many network resellers will be riding the crest of the wave. But by opening up new markets, IP will also offer just as big an opportunity to storage resellers.