It's a Small (Storage) World

I've just returned from a 10-day business tour of Brazil and Argentina, on the heels of an equally lengthy sojourn to Australia. These trips made two things crystal clear. First, companies abroad feel the same pain we do when it comes to storage provisioning, data protection and total cost of ownership. Second, enormous momentum is building behind certain technologies, iSCSI prominent among them, to alleviate this pain.

Having spoken with hundreds of IT professionals from Aussie and South American companies large and small, I can tell you storage is the primary bugaboo of IT today. The complaints are familiar. Storage is becoming a principal component of overall IT expenditures at a time when management is cutting costs to the bone. Managing heterogeneous storage is a bear, and Fibre Channel SANs, where they've been deployed at all, mostly haven't helped. Tape backups are increasingly difficult to complete and often don't provide reliable restore.

To make matters worse, many U.S. vendors have reduced their presence in South America and Down Under. With fewer product options available, IT professionals in those locations are often forced to buy the least cost-effective solutions. They get the sense that U.S. vendors consider them too difficult to do business with because of language barriers, import duties and other obstacles.

This perception isn't unfounded. One vendor rep told me he's not interested in South America because of the huge education investment required. Others said they're focusing on China instead--this despite its relatively immature IT market, not to mention the fact that China recently required a multitrillion-dollar bailout of its banking system (orchestrated by private U.S. investors).

Great iSCSI FitCuriously, little effort has been made to spread the word about iSCSI to South America or Australia, both of which are well-positioned to take advantage of the burgeoning interconnect.

During my whirlwind tour, I saw an almost ideal fit for iSCSI: companies with an abundance of small servers, each with dedicated storage arrays, running mostly small databases and front- and back-office applications. Boasting well-defined IP networks with talented professionals to run them, these enterprises are looking to store their data more efficiently without having to buy expensive, monolithic, single-vendor, hard-to-manage platforms or fabrics. Sounds like a "green field" sales opportunity, if ever there was one.

Of course, iSCSI is an interconnect technology like any other. The beauty is that it can be deployed with no additional investment except for target connection support. You don't require expensive switches or even specialized host bus adapters to support 98 percent of applications today. The initiator software is free.

Maybe that's why the technology has such appeal south of the equator, and why some hardware vendors fail to see its profit potential. But common sense, both in the United States and abroad, is not only driving consumers to the technology, but also creating opportunities for data-management software vendors whose products can leverage the interconnect and create more cost-effective solutions to the knotty storage problems facing us all.

Jon William Toigo is a contributing editor to Storage Pipeline, CEO of storage consultancy Toigo Partners International, and founder and chairman of the Data Management Institute. Write to him at [email protected]0