More Storage Doesn't Mean More Jobs

Q1 earnings are in and for the most part the news is good, and in some cases very good. There were a few misses, but overall it looks like Q1 was a solid quarter. More importantly, most suppliers are giving upbeat guidance for the rest of the year and into 2011. Indications are that users are beginning to ramp up their storage buying, but there is little evidence to suggest that is going to come with increased head count. In short, the "do more with less" IT staffs are going to become the "do even more with the same" IT staff.

If you look at who did well during this economic downturn, typically two types of organizations are represented. First, those that could live off of providing additional product to their installed customer bases. They may have offered you great deals, but they were able to keep product moving. The large storage players are obviously well-represented here.

The second group are the companies that enabled the "do more with less" mentality. I find that these companies are either focused on the "do more" or the "with less" part of that idea. The "do more" companies are those whose storage systems sell for almost the same as the traditional suppliers, but the systems they provide are more intelligent and allow more storage to be managed by the same or fewer people. In storage systems these capabilities include storage virtualization, thin provisioning, automated tiering and integration into the various virtualization platforms, all of which allows more storage management to be done with the same headcount. The "with less" companies are the companies that drove cost out of the storage equation, possibly with some of the advanced storage management features listed above. During the economic downturn we saw greater adoption of storage software, or do it yourself storage, which allows you to load storage software on your hardware. The server virtualization movement also played a part, allowing these software companies to deliver appliances as virtual machines.

Enabled by solutions like file virtualization, as we discuss in "What is File Virtualization?," disk archiving began to play an increasingly important role. Moving data from primary storage to secondary storage as well as retrieving data from the archive became less painful. The increased value of a storage area that is more space efficient, dramatically less expensive and now easy to get to is more appealing than just adding more disk to primary storage.   Finally, acceptance of using what used to be considered secondary storage as primary storage is on the rise. Companies that were using these products as disk backup began to realize that there were no more failures in those systems then in their primary systems, and these backup systems began to move upstream.

I don't see any of these trends ending. There will be increased pressure to add as little additional headcount as possible. In some organizations, we may see the elimination of the storage specialist altogether. That means that suppliers will have to continue to drive complexity and cost out of their offerings. This has to be more than simplifying the management GUI, and more like something where the solution will actually guide the user through the management process and actually increase IT productivity.