Storage sound bytes

Storage is a vast topic to discuss around the table: from the latest attachable hard drives to the complex strategies that must dictate how a global corporation stores its data. Many experts have opinions to share. ITWeb invited several storage specialists to discuss the current issues and found particular topics are front-of-mind.

Present at the roundtable discussion were:

* Allen Smith, MD of Continuity SA
* Adrian Hollier, storage product manager at Comztek
* John Jordaan, storage programme manager at Unisys
* Alex Robertson, TS manager at EMC South Africa
* David Chancellor-Madison, of IBM's storage and technology group
* Sheldon Hand, storage specialist at Symantec
* Grant Morgan, CTO at Dimension Data
* Royden Tustin, GM of EMC at Business Connexion
* Uresh Naran, channel manager of Adic Africa
* James Greig, account manager at Faritec
* Raul del Fabbro, manager of the solutions group at Drive Control Corporation
* Barry Gill, SA technical manager of Mimecast
* Manfred Gramlich, storage practice lead at Sun Microsystems SA

We have a wiser customer than 10 years ago.

David Chancellor-Madison, storage and technology group, IBM

ITWeb: What is the current state of information lifecycle management (ILM)?

Jordaan: Eighteen months ago, ILM was just an idea, but now clients are getting it delivered. They're demanding shared storage, driven by business decisions, to move and store information for less cost. We could talk about being able to do lifecycle management 18 months ago but it was hype.

Chancellor-Madison: IBM has been doing ILM in various formats for the last 40 years on the mainframe, so we have been able to deliver ILM, but I definitely agree there's better acceptance of it now in the market. We've seen annual compound growth rates of 64% in the capacity space, while IT budgets are only growing at single digits at best. So ILM is very relevant as companies look for cheaper and smarter storage.

Robertson: Obviously there are certain information-dense businesses like telecoms and financial services where the growth can be as much as double year-on-year. Also, users are requiring more diverse forms of information more immediately, so you have to store this stuff and it has to be cost-effective, deliverable and manageable. In the mainframe market, the capabilities were always there and were well-executed by trained people in a disciplined fashion, but in the open systems space, the tools are only just coming together now.

Hand: It's always been a challenge in the midrange market for organisations to justify adopting an ILM strategy. The perception has been that it's cheaper just to throw more disk at it. The challenge is to manage it properly. If you don't do it correctly, then you're just shifting the problem from one piece of storage to another. It needs to be a well-thought-out strategy.

ITWeb: How much is compliance with regulations such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley driving ILM and storage?

Customers are saying they don't care how long storage lasts.

Alex Robertson, TS manager, EMC

Gramlich: There are two main factors driving ILM across tiered storage infrastructure: cost and compliance. The value of data changes over time, so it does not make sense to store e-mails, for example, residing on an enterprise-type storage system.

Tustin: ILM is a strategy that aligns IT with business needs based on the changing value of data. What has changed in the industry over the last few years is that there are many more different types of data compared with the past: documentation, reports, files and blocks. There are a lot more uses for data as well - ERM, ERP, data mining and warehousing - and compliance is putting pressure on how businesses should manage that data.

Greig: Where I have seen a lot of excitement from our customers is proposals for data classification from a security angle. Security information management frameworks such as ISO 27001 are creating demand to classify data around those standards according to availability and integrity. The requirement is from storage and the demand is from security, but they're not aligned yet. I think it's much easier at the moment to tack on a recovery point objective or time objective to the back of a security report than try to motivate it from a storage point of view.

ITWeb: How much does legacy affect storage deployment? Are customers' attitudes changing?

Hollier: Yes. Once people have bought storage solutions, they think it's going to solve their problems forever and a day. But with the way technology continually changes, nobody is really prepared to throw out what they've got and put in new stuff, so you have to patch everything together to get it to work. You can add intelligence on top of legacy storage - there are enough products out there that are hardware agnostic - but then speed and time to access become problems.

Chancellor-Madison: There are three things that drive the storage market: infrastructure simplification, business continuity and ILM. We have a wiser customer than 10 years ago, they're more educated and they have more choice. Customers are very concerned about having multiple sets of skills, which is a particular problem in SA. They're starting to look for unique, relatively simple solutions to manage colossal storage environments. We're crazy to compete at a component level. It turns into a competition about 'how low can you drive the cost of disk space?' If we drive it down, somewhere along the line you have to sacrifice something, whether it's R&D or service or something else. I think we need to continue to educate our customers. In the short-term that will drive down prices, but we're starting to have more of a solutions play than just a single piece of disk.

Robertson: What customers are saying to us now is that they don't care how long storage lasts; they're much more interested in the mobility of the information during that process. In a true ILM solution, data moves and moves again, and is finally kicked onto some indestructible medium. I have a customer who says that when his information finally makes it to tape, he kisses it goodbye. It goes into a vault and they sign a piece of paper saying they are compliant. If they want to recover something at any stage, it stays on disk because it's easier to manage and there aren't complexities with technologies that happen over a longer period of time.

Smith: We're finding that as the size of our clients' databases grow, recovering from backup tapes is a problem. It's too slow and it's too complicated. At the bigger clients that have mainframes, Unix boxes and Wintel - with all different tape technologies - they're becoming suspicious that they can't back up everything, or even that they have backed up everything. That's moving them towards looking at mirroring their data. At least with a mirror, you soon find out if everything is there or not.

Naran: You're also finding people moving towards tape libraries. We strongly believe de-duplication is the future. It's a disruptive technology.

ITWeb: Have global business continuity trends made a difference to the storage market? What about SMEs?

Tustin: Financial institutions in the UK are getting fined for being unavailable. A bank or a clearing house that has downtime could get a fine, which costs more than the cost of the infrastructure that would have saved them from the fine in the first place - a real chicken and egg scenario. And they get financial incentives - tax breaks and the like - for putting in such infrastructure.

Don't shift the problem from one kind of storage to another.

Sheldon Hand, storage specialist, Symantec

Smith: That's correct. If they have a proven business continuity solution, then they are given a financial incentive for doing so which wasn't around previously. If you're trying to sell to smaller companies, then you find they're not interested in spending the money; and if you do manage to sell to them, you find that the reward doesn't justify the effort. SMEs are very vulnerable to disasters.

Tustin: The trouble is that bigger companies can afford this infrastructure, but smaller companies can't. But can they afford the risk? We've all got friends in smaller businesses and you ask them whether they're backing up their data; of course, they're not. So you ask them: 'What will be the cost of losing all their data?'; of course, it will cripple them.

ITWeb: How does a large customer make up his mind about a storage offering?

Jordaan: We sell our own servers, but we also resell storage so we have to do what our clients are doing. The key is to see how many software companies the storage vendors own and how they fit in with the grand strategy. For us to decide on which storage company to follow and find out where they're going, we make sure that they're not just selling hardware.

ITWeb: What technologies are on the up at the component level?

Del Fabbro: The current technology that is being punted in a big way is serial-attached SCSI [SAS] for high performance and high availability because the specs are on a par with fibre channel. It's really the successor to SCSI. There's a very good acceptance of the SAS product and there are some extra features. And then there's serial ATA which is now second generation. It offers a very good near-line secondary storage. iSCSI is still a little behind. I see isolated instances of it being used for specific applications. It's a good solution for consolidation of remote offices, for example, because it brings together the manageability of the information with a low-cost connection to a small server. But generally I don't see a lot of low-end customers saying it's the answer.

The world is generating data at a frightening rate. A modern business executive with a laptop, digital camera and video recorder may create many gigabytes of new data every week. When this figure is multiplied by a few hundred, it's clear that the average business has to think deeply about where that data is going to go and how it should be managed until it is archived.

For the larger company, there is no choice: international regulations demand that compliant data storage must be implemented. For the SME, it's time to weigh up the cost of a tiered and correctly managed solution versus the cost of a crippled business when the inevitable data loss strikes.