Embracing Storage

Keeping corporate information safely stored is more important than ever. First, there's more of it. From E-mail to E-learning, data warehousing to geographical information systems, companies are generating, analyzing, and storing ever-increasing mounds of data. Second, regulatory compliance demands a systematic approach to data storage, and increasing security concerns, from hackers to ID theft, have customers--and lawmakers--clamoring for more-effective data-storage methods.

There have been considerable advances. Storage is less expensive than ever before, following along the economics of computer-industry hardware. Also, new technology standards have unbound IT departments from buying their disk networks from the same companies that made their computers. And in the coming year, storage networks should get easier to manage.

"Vendors are building products with simplicity in mind--simple to install and run," says Dennis Martin, an analyst at research firm Evaluator Group. "They should be easy and friendly to use, compared with products that used to take days to install and were complicated to use."

The storage industry's most conspicuous trend is consolidation, as vendors try to expand beyond their traditional industry segments. Storage leader EMC Corp. alone has bought 10 companies in the past four years. And No.1 archiving vendor Iron Mountain Inc. last week acquired PC and E-mail archiving vendor Connected Corp. At the same time, there are new players. Microsoft is entering the market in a bigger way by building more backup-and-recovery capabilities on top of Windows. Similarly, security-software vendor Symantec Corp. is increasing its investment in backup-and-recovery products, as evidenced by its acquisition last year of PowerQuest Corp.

As a result, new technologies are due to come to market next year that should make it easier to keep information safe in emergencies, keep important documents readily at hand to comply with the flurry of new laws and regulations, and manage the variety of disks, tapes, and other storage media from multiple vendors that are spreading across data centers.Vendors are being aggressive. Market leader EMC Corp. plans to bring out next year new capabilities that let customers save all their data to three different sites around the world, a first for a packaged product, ensuring the survival of data even in a disaster. IBM is developing new hardware and IT services for its consulting business that can back up data and "virtualize" computers and disks in pools to handle the most pressing workloads. And next year, Microsoft plans to ship server-side software, called the Data Protection Server, optimized for backup and recovery. Systems vendors will incorporate Data Protection Server in products so customers can recover information from disks in minutes, automate data backups while tying up few IT resources, and consolidate backup processes.

Meanwhile, costs continue to fall, pushing the price of disk storage down to pennies per megabyte, compared with as much as 50 cents per megabyte five years ago. High-speed Fibre Channel connected storage hasn't seen such drastic price drops and still requires IT shops to run separate networks for those devices. The market for Fibre Channel storage area networks, which let companies process more information faster, has yet to take off, but that could change next year as prices fall and performance rises.

To help business-technology managers plan the best storage investments, InformationWeek took a look at the most significant trends due to shape the storage market next year. In all, 2005 could be a breakout year for new storage capabilities.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, there's been a growing awareness of the need to back up information continually and to multiple sites. That awareness has spread beyond the financial-services industry. Companies want to mirror data among sites continually and can't afford the hours of system downtime it historically has taken to perform that archiving. Vendors recognize companies want tools to make that easier.

"Business continuity was huge in 2004," boasts Howard Elias, executive VP of corporate marketing and technology at EMC. "But it will explode in 2005." EMC's three-site backup technology is its latest business-continuity strategy. "Even if [a user] loses two sites, the company is still operational," Elias says, adding that customers do that with homegrown systems today, but they're costly and complicated.

By building more backup-and-recovery functions in its Windows Server product, Microsoft is making its hardest push into the storage-management market. Data Protection Server can aggregate alerts to the IT staff via E-mail and even fix components that crash. The company's selling point: Disk outages should cause just an hour of downtime, compared with a day for tape technology. "Backup methods haven't changed much in 20 years," says Ben Matheson, group product manager at Microsoft's Windows Server division. "We plan to enable systems to do backups simply," he says. "With our software inside, storage becomes a big file server."Rance Petty, network support manager at FlightSafety International Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that develops flight-simulation systems for airplane manufacturers, wants to improve the speed and reliability of data exchange. The company plans to make data available over its wide area network, and even longer distances over the Web, so traveling managers and engineers working off the company network can access databases. That could save on overnight shipping costs or the trouble of burning CDs to transfer information. FlightSafety is using CommVault Systems Inc.'s Galaxy backup-and-recovery software, along with the company's Migrator data-migration products, to protect and recover information on-line from remote sites.

Shawn Eveleigh, a senior system administrator at Zenon Environmental Inc., a $200 million-a-year maker of water-purification systems, wants to go beyond the database replication the company currently does. "I'd like to get into off-site data replication, protecting our most critical data in case of disaster," Eveleigh says. "If something happens to our data center next year, we won't have to go all the way back to the previous day to restore." So Zenon is using snapshot software from EqualLogic Inc. to ensure business continuity.

IBM offers to handle a customer's entire storage environment through its Total Storage Resiliency program. Next year, IBM plans to deliver capabilities that include zero downtime and mirroring to a third site. "We want to change the economics of the storage industry with our technology," says Pete McCaffrey, director of storage marketing.

That's appealing to some companies looking to radically overhaul their storage environments. John Young, a senior systems engineer at Presbyterian Health Care Services, an Albuquerque, N.M., health-care provider and health-maintenance organization, expects six-figure savings in systems and administration and faster data movement next year, as his company moves from a mainframe system to a Linux system, with help from a Bus-Tech Inc. storage-data-migration appliance and IBM's storage strategy. "All at the same time, we will migrate data to the new servers, migrate all our data backups to the new IBM Fast T storage, add new capacity for additional backups, and replace all of our old tapes," Young says. The old mainframe-based tape system was put in place in 1984.

Veritas Software Corp.'s NetBackup product for the Unix market already gives customers high-end functionality such as automated allocation of capacity as needed. Next year, Windows shops using Veritas' Backup Exec software could recover data much more quickly. Combined with Veritas' Storage Replicator, Backup Exec could back up data continuously and work with mirroring technology to shorten the time customers need to have systems offline.Symantec hopes to establish itself as a major storage vendor by dramatically simplifying backup and recovery. Last year, the company acquired PowerQuest for its file-based backup-and-recovery capabilities. Using that technology, the vendor hopes to let customers recover files from below the operating-system level of the software stack, which could help circumvent data conversions."Even a large server could take an hour or more to recover certain files," says Don Kleinschnitz, VP of product delivery at Symantec Enterprise Administration. "We could do it in 10 minutes." Features available next year in Symantec's LiveState Recovery software are supposed to let companies program systems on the edge of the network, see the status of backup processes, and accomplish rapid recovery of data when needed. Even more important, Symantec will make LiveState one of five modules on a central management console.

"Now, customers have to install and operate each node exclusively," Kleinschnitz says. "From the central console, they'll kick off multiple backup processes for multiple departments."

Under pressure from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations that have arisen from the business scandals of the past few years, companies need to know where all their information lives and be able to produce it fast. Court cases have shown that it's incumbent on companies to produce E-mails, instant messages, and other documents quickly, retrieving them by searching for who created the information, who accessed it, and when.

That's why some companies are starting to build tiers of storage that let them set policies to move information quickly between expensive fast media and cheaper slower devices. It's called information-life-cycle management--the reigning buzzwords in the storage market. More companies will adopt tiered storage next year, says Mike Fisch, an analyst at IT research firm the Clipper Group, "but every path will be different, based on what hurts them."

One technology that's enabling this is serial ATA, being developed by vendors including Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, and IBM. Serial ATA storage is technically like the disk interfaces used in laptops. It's much cheaper than hard-disk storage--about the same price as tape systems--but easier to pull information from than tapes.Ken Westerback, an IT architect at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, is looking for help from IBM to deal with rapid growth of raw capacity, thanks to digital-imaging systems and X-rays. The hospital needs tiered storage to deal with some 20 terabytes a year in new imaging data, while the number of users on E-mail mushrooms from 2,000 to 5,000. "We need to incrementally add physical storage, and it should be far cheaper over time--easily 50% to 70% less" than today's prices, he says.

He's considering IBM's Total Storage Manager, with automated provisioning and storage-resource management, so he doesn't have to purchase what he calls "worst case" volumes of capacity. "We'll try to buy into low-cost serial ATA drives next year," he says. One big motivation for rethinking the company's storage strategy: An IT effort called Project Gemini that aims to eliminate notes on charts and increase doctors' ability to work online, to order drugs and tests, and do other administrative tasks. To increase digitization, St. Michael's is considering buying PDAs for doctors or Tablet PCs to put on patients' bedsides. "Whatever option we choose next year, it means a lot more data online for access," Westerback says.

Maher Hanna, hardware engineering manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which manages the Mars rover missions and Cassini Saturn probe, is looking at tiered storage to balance its need for real-time mirroring of data for some projects and long-term archiving for others. The lab's data volume has grown from 1 terabyte in 2002 to 50 terabytes today, "and we expect it to double in the next couple of years," Hanna says. "We must store all the data brought back from spacecraft that go up. We never toss any information when it arrives." In fact, much of it will get saved for many years.

Since the emergence of storage networks in the mid-1990s, IT managers have been throwing up their hands at storage-system sprawl. On the other side of the sales equation, vendors have resisted making it easier to manage competitors' products from within theirs.That's certainly the experience of some users. Managing Sun Microsystems storage technology along with clustered-storage-system vendor 3PARdata Inc.'s technology is just too labor intensive, says Myles Trachtenberg, chief technology officer at online grocer FreshDirect LLC. "I'd take a look at a single management console for both environments," he says.

Vendors claim they're finally addressing this pain point. On the horizon is management software that lets IT staffers use one console to control storage from a number of vendors. And a new standard in the storage industry should help that effort along.IBM plans to beef up marketing and services support of its SAN Volume Controller product and is considering loading the SAN controller on a partition from its new DS8000 storage system, so customers can manage multiple vendors' systems from that single interface. And Symantec next year plans to ship its management console for backup and recovery, patch management, and other important infrastructure requirements.

EMC customers next year will be able to use Control Center 5.2, a storage-management-software suite, to provision storage capacity automatically and monitor and report on the health, utilization, and performance of multivendor storage components from a single user interface. To do that, the company is supporting the Storage Management Initiative Specification, which lets systems from different vendors communicate. The specification came out of the Storage Networking Industry Association, whose members include EMC, IBM, and Veritas.

Evaluator Group's Martin is optimistic about better management capabilities. "We were skeptical about how the system vendors would respond to SMI-S, and we're pleasantly surprised," he says. Storage software vendors such as Computer Associates and Veritas should support the Storage Management Initiative Specification next year, Martin says. "We'll really be excited when software vendors start providing the management interface in the products they ship."

Veritas has always counted on a heterogeneous computing world and customers who need to support multiple operating systems and storage environments. As a software developer, Veritas says it has an advantage over hardware vendors like IBM. "They can't just wake up one morning and say they're heterogeneous," says Jeremy Burton, executive VP of data management at Veritas.

In the same way, customers can't just wake up and have all their storage-management needs met. But developments next year may get them a little closer to that dream.

Illustration by Dan Page

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