Top Storage Grinches 2007

What's stealing the joy -- seasonal or otherwise -- from data centers worldwide? The end of the year is a good time to take stock.

We don't think this is nay-saying. After all, what IT pro worth their Blackberry can possibly declare total satisfaction with the state of the art? The steep growth of data, and the ongoing need for better, faster, and cheaper solutions on already-squeezed budgets make for a challenging and unforgiving environment.

This holiday season, we revisit some of storage networkers' chief concerns about the industry in general and their suppliers in particular. Following is the list, in no particular order. PS: Feel free to add your own observations to the message board, or write to us.

Grinch No. 1: Capacity-based storage software licensing. Storage customers have complained for years about the trend among large suppliers such as EMC, HDS, and IBM to license certain software features of storage systems according to the capacity of the system involved, instead of by feature or function.

In a Byte and Switch poll on the subject, over half the respondents felt the policy was unreasonable, even though it's solidly entrenched among large vendors. Maybe with time and pressure from the right quarters, suppliers will start to rethink their approach. But this is the storage market, so who knows?Grinch No. 2: Exaggerated performance claims. Everyone greets vendor-sponsored tests of equipment and software performance with fistfuls of salt. But no amount of skepticism has stopped big vendors from conducting self-serving lab tests that generate "surprising" results. In recent months, activity in this space has surpassed the annoyance thresholds of many storage pros, particularly in areas like data de-duplications, where there are lots of variables -- and loads of hype.

Grinch No. 3: Piecemeal backup. Despite some evidence that storage software is growing faster than hardware, a user survey by financial firm Robert W. Baird & Co. indicates that enterprise IT pros think backup apps have room for improvement.

Backup software received the lowest of eight scores -- 7.4 -- on a list of technologies for which respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction levels on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being highest satisfaction).

Part of any discontent among users may stem from the plethora of backup features that aren't combined in one product. CDP, archiving, snapshotting, and data de-duplication are all valuable, but the bad news is that they're not usually offered in a single package. Until there's a better mesh of valuable backup options under one roof, dissatisfaction will be a byproduct.

Grinch No. 4: Failure to meet sales claims -- after the sale. Combine customer need with big-vendor blarney and what do you get? Sometimes, not what you expected. Ask Jeff Hamer, IT manager at architectural firm 360 Architecture, based in Kansas City, Mo. After six months of trying to make Cisco WAAS work in his site only to be told the product was already working as advertised and Cisco couldn't do any better, Hamer pulled the plug in favor of another WAN optimization supplier.It's definitely up to users to do the diligence, but that doesn't stop the frustration when things don't go as planned. That's the kind of disappointment experienced by Raul Robledo, now a storage specialist with relationship management firm Affinion Group. A while back, Robledo and his colleagues at another firm purchased software from an SRM startup called AppIQ (later to become part of HP's Storage Essentials lineup), only to discover they didn't have the right software infrastructure to support it. He kicked himself, but it would have been nice to have his vendor's due diligence up front, too.

Grinch No. 5: Startups. Startups make the storage world go round. But when they fall on hard times, it's tough for customers to recoup their investments. Ask any of the 300-odd customers left in the lurch by the recently imploded NeoScale, which dissolved last month without notifying either customers or resellers. By the time its assets were bought by nCipher, support was relegated to an unmanned Web portal, and some products had dropped off the map completely.

Next page

Grinch No. 6: FRCP. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are a pain in everyone's posterior. A year after introduction of the rules requiring electronic evidence disclosure by firms involved in lawsuits, storage pros are struggling with what data and documents need to be retained, the legal implications of backup versus archiving, and newly established tiers of discovery.

"Unless you're going to limit [e-discovery] costs or where you look, then justice is determined by wealth, not by the merits of the case," said Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in a video clip shown at a recent tradeshow talk given by Stephanie Mendelsohn, director of corporate records and electronic discovery for Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco, Calif.Courts and corporations are struggling with the potential for an electronic wild goose chase introduced by the FRCP rules. The result is a snarl of problems that will take years to sort out.

Grinch No. 7: Email. Another offshoot of the FRCP ruling is that most ITers fear throwing out a lot of email, in case lawyers come calling. Storage pros who skimp on protecting and organizing email in a way that lets them get at specific messages quickly may be endangering their future, as well as the future of the organizations that employ them.

"More attorneys are looking for who knew what when," said Michael McCreary, senior director of the legal business technology division at Pfizer, during a tradeshow presentation this past fall. "Plaintiffs' attorneys would rather litigate your business process than the merits of the case... If attorneys can discredit your business process, then they can discredit your organization in the courts."

Talk about pressure. Given the emphasis on email as not just a business application but a tool of compliance, pros who skimp on protecting and organizing it are risking their careers -- surely a grinch in action.

Grinch No. 8: Green IT. Storage customers want to do the right thing when it comes to saving the plant. But what needs to be done, and how? While vendors hype the power savings of their wares, analysts rail against the weak or false claims, and customers are left wondering what direction they can afford to take. Until the air clears, it's going to be a case of green making for gray.Grinch No. 9: Patent litigation. The last time we checked, more than half of over 200 readers of Byte and Switch viewed the NetApp/Sun patent lawsuit and countersuit as "hooey." Nobody wants to see an unfair distribution of anyone's assets. But the blurry lines in this squabble would scare anyone with a support contract from either vendor. One has to wonder: To what end?

Grinch No. 10: Storage management. The struggle for effective and comprehensive management of storage networks continues. Despite customer pleas, vendors continue to muddy the waters by protecting their own interests when it comes to SRM. Sure, there's been progress, but features like heterogeneous storage management, root cause analysis, and automation of storage functions across multiple devices are still largely missing in action. What's more, nearly every SRM solution out there requires purchase of layers of underlying prerequisite packages. Sadly, there's no end to the complexity in sight.

So another year draws to a close. With any luck, by this time in 2008, at least one or two of the above nuisances may be history. Then again, for some storage pros, the list is no doubt longer than the one we've presented.

Happy holidays!

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.