With recent movements in the market towards completely open source and open standards-based storage environments, the days of expensive, difficult to manage and vendor locked-in infrastructure could be over.
Contrary to the market belief around this being a death knell for resellers and systems integrators, there's healthy money to made in providing customers with a storage solution that frees them from any form of vendor lock-in, allows them to do a great deal of their storage management themselves and most importantly, saves them a fortune.
In fact, open source and standards-based approaches to storage solutions are fast becoming one of our primary routes to market when we recommend storage solutions to our customers.
The concept of open storage hinges on the fact that all storage hardware is in essence standard industry x86 architecture components. All storage hardware is similar, if one considers that it's front-ended by a server and back-ended with disk array enclosures that have a variety of storage components attached - ranging most noticeably from flash disk to enterprise SATA drives.
One then installs an open source and open standards-compliant operating system (generally Linux or an open source form of Open Solaris) on the storage server and uses any variety of open source and open standards-compliant file systems - such as Sun's ZFS - which then enables natively more superior management and brings new efficiencies to storage solution.
All that remains is to pick on the many storage management front-ends available in the open source community to elegantly manage the high-level aspects of the Open Storage solution, and you're away.
The choice of front-end solution makes a massive difference to the overall success of the open storage solution the customer builds, since managing space allocation, permissions and performance-tuning and other complex tasks from a Linux or Unix command-shell is the domain of highly-skilled and costly specialist engineers.
By employing a friendly, graphical front-end, the same relatively complex tasks can be carried out by an IT engineer, IT manager or similar-level staff member, without incurring the additional cost of training or sourcing the right staff member for that task.
It's not, however, at the beginning of the cycle where open storage grants the majority of its value to customers - it's over the long-term where open storage really begins making sense.
The day-to-day management of an open storage solution is a snap if the right front-end tools are employed, and when it comes to scalability, nothing can compare to the ease of use with which storage volumes can be extended. More important is that there are no additional costs to be incurred for additional functionality, as this is included in the open platform from the onset.
Best practises in the open storage market show that customers can easily start with a 2TB array and expand it to half a Petabyte (500TB) by simply adding disks and merging them into an existing array.
It's a dream come true.
While many resellers and integrators are initially reticent to embrace open storage - because lower cost solutions generally mean lower margins - more and more channel players are realising that this in turn leaves budgetary room for other opportunities to be explored.
The cost efficiency of open approaches to storage gives us the ability to deliver inexpensive, yet extremely effective solutions in a sea of expensive, onerous to manage competition - and immediate differentiator.
Secondly, because of the reduced timeframes one of these solutions can be rolled out in, we're able to do three to four of these solutions in the same time it would take us to do one - in essence increasing our rate of turnover.
The sales cycle is also far easier when you're talking in the realm of R300k for an average sized storage solution as opposed to the roughly R1 million this would cost via other proprietary approaches.
Immediately, that gives us the ability to offer customers three times more bang for their buck, or to divert two-thirds of their storage budget into another project they've been itching to tackle, but haven't had the budget to even think of before.
We're extremely interested in where our investigation into open storage takes us, since it's a compelling route forward for our customers and ourselves.
There's also a wealth of opportunity out there - we can for the first time use any vendor's hardware and add open source, open standards compliant components to our skills complement to create a high-value storage solution at a third of the cost of buying one pre-built from a traditional vendor.
Open storage could well hail an end to high-cost and complexity in the storage market.
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