Change Is Good

To paraphrase a slogan from the recent political season, change is on the way. If there was ever a doubt about the potential impact of new technologies on storage, a series of product announcements this week by major vendors has made it clear that things are changing in Storageland and probably for the better.

This week we've seen product rollouts by EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA), and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). EMC introduced its Cloud-Optimized Storage, which aims to make it easy for service providers and enterprise IT departments to offer storage as a service. Sun rolled out a line of low-cost, high-performance appliances that make innovative use of solid-state technology. And Cisco announced SANs optimized to work with VMware's virtualization technology.

There are many interesting elements to each announcement. In at least one (Sun), it is the use of innovative hardware. But it is the new software that holds the most promise over the long run. Advances in hardware are important and can help you store more data, improve performance, or cut costs. But in most cases hardware isn't going to make your job easier or let you provide more services to your customers and your company. With new, sophisticated software, each vendor vows to automate many of the mundane and tedious processes that fill the days of storage administrators.

Whether it's cloud-optimized storage, open-source storage, VMware-optimized SANs, or just upgrades to existing storage software applications, we are now beginning to see the kinds of advanced management capabilities that seem more commonplace in other parts of the IT department. And it's about time. The amount of manual work that goes into managing storage and backups and archiving seems excessive, even though it may provide job security.

I am constantly amazed at how many things in Storageland have not yet been automated. That's beginning to change. Vendors are constantly upgrading their storage management software to eliminate more of the manual tasks that have been part of the job for many years. Something as simple as moving rarely accessed information to a less-costly tier of storage is something that the system should handle, not a person.This kind of automation is showing up in more management applications, especially as major storage vendors migrate features from their high-end systems into more affordable systems. Virtually every vendor briefing I've had in recent months has contained the words "easy to use," and the products have been promoted as ideal for small and mid-sized businesses that don't have large IT departments. I hope they're right

That's not to overlook advances in hardware. Solid-state technology has the potential to dramatically improve the performance of storage systems and change the standard buying equation from price-per-gigabyte to price-per-performance. Sun's effort is innovative in the sense that it isn't just using SSDs as a replacement for conventional storage systems. The company instead seems to have put together a system that uses solid-state technology in a clever fashion that takes best advantage of its high-speed capabilities.

And let us not forget the cloud -- potentially the most disruptive of the new storage technologies. Cloud storage, if it can overcome questions of security and latency, has the potential to grab a significant chunk of the market, especially for smaller companies that are willing to offload tasks to third parties once they've proven themselves reliable. IDC says a growing number of businesses facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures are evaluating online services for backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business continuity, and availability.

Together, these developments lay out a road map of change for storage. None of this is going to happen quickly. Most companies will take months to test new technologies and services before they're willing to use them for business-critical data. And that's the way it should be -- there is too much at risk to rush into new systems.

It may take years before these new technologies play a major role in enterprise storage. Eventually, however, they will. There seems little doubt that, over time, cloud storage services, solid-state disks, and storage virtualization, combined with more capable management software, will let storage managers do more with less and do it better. That's the kind of change we can believe in.0