Roundtable: The Store Doctors

In the first of PC Dealer?s roundtable discussions, Simon Meredith talks to industry figures about the opportunities and obstacles in storage management

In the run-up to Networks 97, PC Dealer brought together leading figures from vendors and distributors to discuss the key issue of storage management.

Chairman: Simon Meredith. Panel: Nick Sundby, optical product manager, Hitachi; Jim Spooner, MD, SST; Eddie Moore, storage product manager, Ideal Hardware; Ian Stretton, product manager, Seagate Software; and Noel Leslie, marketing manager, Cristie Electronics.

With Networks growing rapidly, the internet and intranet extending their reach, and with more voice, video and even more data being distributed around the organisation, the efficient management of storage is becoming a key issue for IT managers. It is thus an excellent opportunity for the reseller.

At the forthcoming Networks 97 event, storage management will be a prevailing theme, but how can resellers best use their time and resources to address the issue? We brought together a panel of experts to try to answer this question and address the multitude of issues surrounding the management of storage technologies.

Eddie Moore, storage products manager at Ideal Hardware, got straight to the point, right at the start of the discussion. ?From our perspective, we see it as a way of selling storage.? That?s the way resellers ought to look at storage management. Sell the concept, and the disk arrays, optical libraries and tape drives ought to follow.

It?s the same old story ? you have to do more than sell the box on. ?If all resellers are doing is selling the drive and making a small amount of margin on that, then they are never going to grow the business significantly. We see the tie-in with storage management, for example, where Seagate has gone with the purchases it?s made, the opportunity exists there to tie all this together so that you can increase margins.?

Well, that sounds great, but what do we mean by storage management? Ian Stretton of Seagate Software thinks the problem is that so many different sub-sections have been shoved under the same umbrella over the past few years, with hierarchical storage management (HSM), tape optical library software and the management of all these systems falling into the definition.

?That is one of the problems that the user has ? a lot of lines have been blurred and a lot of focus has been lost by so many things being rolled into one.?

Jim Spooner agreed. ?Typically, you now deal with users that have a requirement for storage in the network ? it might be based on CD or it might suit another technology, but wrapped around that is the question of how do you present that storage to the network user, what sort of performance can you get, what sort of reliability can they get. Storage management just differentiates the selling of a piece of hardware ? you are selling something that?s manageable and usable in the network environment.?

But it is important to avoid forcing the issue, said Moore. ?You are not going to target storage management at someone who is going to buy one hard disk and one tape and that?s the end of the problem. You are going to target corporate customers who have so much storage that the term ?storage management? begins to gel as a concept. If you have got that target, you can explain what it is going to do, then you are going to demystify it.?

This is one of the key points that arose in the debate. Storage management is something that resellers can use as a selling tool. What it actually is depends on what you are selling and to whom you are trying to sell it. Resellers will need to conceptualise about the subject because it is not something vendors are pushing seriously.

Nick Sundby said storage management does not make it on to the agenda at Hitachi ? if it did, it would mean taking the opportunity out of the concept.

?The reality is that we are here to offer superior hardware solutions and our distributors and resellers are going to bundle them with whatever software management tools they want. But all our focus goes into selling superior hardware. We don?t really get that close to storage management. We have an element of that solution, but rely on the expertise of the reseller to bundle an appropriate solution for the customer.?

But Cristie Electronics takes quite a different view. ?Quite often we are doing the selling for dealers ? most people don?t have a storage management issue. They have a lot of data somewhere and they want to make sure it?s all still going to be there next week or next month. There is a whole host of things that can provide that solution ? tapes, optical, software ? and the thing that comes across most strongly is that there is a massive array of choice which causes a lot of confusion,? said Noel Leslie.

Even the choice of tape drive is difficult, with so many different technologies now on the market. Firms like Cristie need to help users to make the right choice and give resellers the knowledge they need to facilitate this.

But Moore felt this was missing the point slightly. He believes the choice of technologies is a separate issue and is not central to the management of storage. ?To me, applications drive the choice of hardware. Storage management is once you?ve got the products, how do you ensure that it works efficiently or that you?ve got the most efficient use out of it??

?That?s right,? Leslie added, ?but if you asked the average IS manager, what they really care about is ensuring that they can?t lose data, and that involves a decision about the technology they are going to use. I think we should keep bringing it back to the poor guy who?s got to buy the stuff and make sure he?s getting cost effective use out of it and a return on his investment.?

This seemed to suggest that the panel felt the storage management opportunity is confined to the corporate market. But not everyone agreed with this view.

?What you?re saying is that there are definition changes as you move up the scale,? said Stretton. ?I believe there is a need for storage or data management at the single-user level. We?ve been in a lot of discussions about this, but we are not using the term storage management so much ? we?ve switched to information accessibility.?

Seagate thinks there may be an opportunity to sell the renamed concept into the home and small business markets, but if there is, it surely won?t help the reseller community. But the fact that Seagate has invented a new term to sell the idea to another set of users, illustrates the need for greater clarity. There is, perhaps, a need to differentiate the concept of managing network storage from the need to protect the data that resides on the system.

Moore does not think so. He said: ?It?s a bit like a tree with lots of branches isn?t it? Ultimately, they come under one umbrella, but understanding what hard disks you?ve got out there and what they are doing at that particular moment in time, and how you?re securing the data that?s on there. They are the same concept but just different developments of it. To me, storage management is an application as opposed to a purchase of an individual product or technology.?

?What we try to do is think about what the user wants to buy rather than what we want to sell,? said Spooner. ?The computer industry can come up with terms like HSM, that mean something to IT people, but the user buys a means to manage data and I think it?s important to take that angle.?

Middle distance

But what do they want to buy right now? ?There?s interest in many things,? said Spooner, ?but quite often what they are most interested in is making data available in their network and there are a range of hardware and software technologies that can make that available. Whichever technology the user chooses, and how they mix that with different HSM solutions or whatever, all depends on their application and how they want to see it.?

But it is the resellers? job to reconcile this in the end? Are they doing so at the moment? The opinion from around the table was that they are not doing as well as they could be. ?Doesn?t that say to us that it?s actually quite complex for resellers to sell these solutions?? asked Noel Leslie.

Moore responded: ?I get the opportunity to talk to users and quite often we find that they do have an idea of what they want, but the people in the middle don?t necessarily understand it because they are too busy taking care of just selling that product today without learning what?s coming next and how we can add value to what the customer really wants to do ? or rather, what they want to do with the customer.?

So dealers are too busy to learn about storage management? ?I don?t think they are too busy but when I speak to users, the information that comes back to me is that they have this need, but when they approach their reseller they can?t fulfil it. I have to go and tell them what to buy and it strikes me that, OK they may be too busy, perhaps they are too frightened of taking some risks, perhaps they are too scared about going into the arena because it?s not something they fully understand.?

?There?s an underlying point here,? added Leslie. ?If you look at the value of this part of the business, it?s actually very small ? somewhere between two and five per cent of the whole business. So if you?ve got a wide range of products, which most of these companies have, what justification is there for spending a significant amount of time and energy getting up to date on various push agents of Arcserve 6 or whatever? That?s the justification for Cristie and companies like us existing, because storage is the only thing we do.?

But Moore said when you get down to selling the product, there are some fairly easy concepts to understand, like Smart disk management.

Popular technologies, however, do become standard features, and subsequently cease to add to the sales story. To make serious money from selling storage management you need to go further. There may be an element of risk but some resellers have become specialists in storage management, according to Spooner.

?There are specialists at the high end who deliver very high- end backup or archiving systems, and who survive just on that area,? he said. They have to go through a long learning curve to get there, though, and it would take a lot of time and effort to move from the two to five per cent level to making storage core to the business.

?There?s also a risk because in the high-end storage systems you can be talking about long sales cycles that could be three or six months, even a year, and the average reseller who is trying to ship so many Compaq or HP servers a month can?t focus time on it.?

Even so, Moore thinks they should focus time on storage because the users need to get help from somewhere. ?If you?ve got a corporate with a huge amount of storage and you?ve got nothing telling you what?s going on with that storage, what are the alternatives??

Sundby disagreed. The need for resellers with storage management expertise is not that clear cut, he said. ?A corporation will have an IT manager that is already familiar with HSM and perhaps comes from a mainframe background and understands the concepts.?

But, asked Stretton, what is most cost-effective for the user? ?What is better value for a company? To have lots of expensive IT people or a good storage management system??

?Surely the alternative is a long-term relationship with the dealer,? said Leslie. ?You can source products cheaper, you can go to the catalogue operations, but what they are principally buying is a safe pair of hands. It?s expertise, it?s knowledge, it?s being there when they want that support.

?I think there are a lot of opportunities for dealers, particularly in the top end of the market, but it requires investment in time, training and commitment to exploit them.?

Spooner said it pays off for resellers that invest time in learning the product. ?We find that some of our best customers are those who?ll let us come down and show them, who get to know the products and get successful with them, develop their own expertise but at the same time use your expertise to develop the business.?

?So much of it has to be on the services that go around the hardware, be that training and installation, be that post-sales maintenance. I think those are the areas where there is opportunity to make more margin,? said Leslie.

?It?s like anything,? Moore added, ?when you start with a newer concept, those are always the points with which you can make money. But as people become more familiar with the technology, the opportunities to make better profits diminish.?

But, said Sundby, there is even a need here for users to get expert help. Systems may claim to deliver certain benefits as standard as the technology matures, but may not do the job thoroughly enough and could end up exposing data to a higher risk than the user thinks.

For the sake of self-preservation, resellers also have to be aware of the product?s capabilities. ?A reseller could invest a lot of time and effort putting in a system that is not 100 per cent and could end up damaging the customer?s data in some way,? added Sundby. Resellers need to know, for example, if a tape streamer will restore data reliably as well as back it up.

Having this basic level of product knowledge is becoming more important because of the spread of the network. ?The network gives you the means for more people to share more information,? said Spooner.

?Whereas five years ago they would have come to us and said: I?ve got this server and I want to put a Raid system on, now it?s: here?s my network and I need storage within it.?

Expertise in both areas is important, said Stretton. ?You have cross-platform issues, bandwidth and bottleneck issues, and you?ve got to deliver solutions.? The network, Leslie pointed out, dictates how quickly you can back up data.

?The performance of the network is becoming more of an issue and it?s one area that creates a lot more opportunities for everyone. You?ve got to go across all the platforms.?

This means resellers need to have a broad understanding of the technologies as well. They need to work out what is required from their customers to exploit the storage management opportunity, said Moore. ?Storage management is an application of technique. What perhaps resellers need to identify are the various levels of storage management so they can look at it and say: there?s my opportunity, this is what I can apply. I can apply storage management level one, level two, level three, to my customers.

?Perhaps that?s what we need ? to break it down into meaningful areas so resellers can see how it applies to the customer base they work with.?

This would be something vendors and distributors would need to help resellers do. Perhaps they should consider it because, in the end, storage management is about more than a pure product sales opportunity ? it is also an opportun- ity to sell consultancy and support services.

Moore summed it up very neatly: ?I can help them increase their efficiency in the use of storage, and in helping them to do that, increase my profile with them, increase the opportunity to sell more hardware and service to them. The opportunity for profit may not come from storage management, but in helping with the resource they have got you are getting your foot in the door.?

It is hard to put your finger on what the term storage management means precisely, but it hardly matters. What is certain is that the expansion of networks means there is a growth in the use of storage and a greater need than ever to provide a managed solution that will allow the network manager to maximise the availability of data, minimise network traffic and protect data.

It is a massive opportunity and one that embraces many products so, as well as generating opportunities to add value, it presents the opportunity for higher product sales and improved customer loyalty.