I was in sales and systems engineering of storage systems for about 5 years. My experience comes from entering a customer environment, assessing their needs (both stated and unstated), reviewing the technologies in my portfolio against those needs and against what other manufacturers could provide, and designing and implementing an architecture.

I’ve been out of the game for about 3 years, so when I saw this case come up I spent a couple hours familiarizing myself with some of the current technologies and what the vendors are offering. I then posed the question to some of my close friends still in industry (a couple with manufacturers, one with a VAR, and one with a consulting company) – “what has changed since I’ve been gone?”

Their replies, almost unanimous in view, were telling:

“Not much”

Well, what does that mean? While I as a sales person was touting the “next big thing” every six months, the truth is that storage is a slow-moving industry – one that does not respond to bleeding edge technology very well. iSCSI is big-time now – but when was the first product released on the market? I believe IBM claims to have commercially installed the first one in 2001. In many industries, entire product sets are born, grow up, and die in that time. Do you remember the cell phone you had in 2001?

Where is the current SAN market heading? The answer is incremental improvement. It’s hard not to fall into the trap of believing that each new standard or technology is going to revolutionize the
world. It’s particularly hard as a manufacturer who has to decide what to invest in and how to keep all the boxes checked on the “market needs” scorecard – let alone do any innovating. One needs to focus the most investment in the technologies with the highest leverage. How does one
identify these technologies? That’s the subject of a dissertation, but I’ll try to address it in an additional post. However, some short comments on the suggested technologies below might be an indication.

FCoE sounds “cool” but if it is really the future, then it’s a long way off. I believe Howard Marks’
assessment of the situation, posted nearly a year ago, is prophetic: If it took iSCSI seven years to become a player, and it’s still not even a regular in the big games, how long will it take FCoE? It has a little leverage, but only because it is adding value to an existing sizable investment in a company’s FC infrastructure. It’s a portal, an add on. I think Mr. Marks is on the money.

De-dup is another one. It’s not snake oil – because it works – but it’ll never be prime time. Certain manufacturers are touting de-dup as a way to reduce disk requirements 90% and thus enable WAN-based replication and the solution to all your disaster recovery needs. Sound funny? I recall working with a consulting company in Austin who were selling SANs by assessing a company’s entire disk capacity versus their used capacity and saying a SAN could help recover all their wasted space (75%?) by connecting the drives across the enterprise – they wouldn’t have to buy new disk for 24 months! The fatal flaw was that almost all of the “wasted” space was server-based mirrored OS drives: 18.2 GB drives (times two!) that contained a total of 6GB of data. All that wasted space would never be accessible to the SAN because the drives were internal SCSI. De-dup is being marketed with some of the same flaws. De-dup’s future is minimizing device-based utilization, not enterprise-wide utilization, because de-dup is designed for a specific product, manufacturer, or standard. Storage networking in an enterprise always contains multiple products, manufacturers, and standards. De-dup is a useful feature to be point purchased with components, but it has no enterprise leverage.

Well, is there any good news? NFS. I believe Stephen Foskett also commented on this, in a way humorously opposite of my take. “Humble” NAS is the growth engine supporting VMware servers. If anyone has doubts about the future viability of NAS, look no further than where VMware was two, four, or six years ago. You find significant leverage in a product or a standard that addresses or accommodates an area of nearly uncontrollable growth. You find leverage in something that makes growth easy, and NAS with NFS support tremendously eases growth in a virtual server world.

In fact, perhaps I should amend a statement above. One shouldn’t necessarily invest simply in the technologies that have the most leverage. One, whether they’re a manufacturer trying to develop a product, or a customer trying to solve a pain, should invest in a technology that’s easy – because one that’s easy is the one that will have the most leverage. As a launching pad of discussion – what storage technologies, standards, or products give you the most ease in your position? I’ll take this topic up in a subsequent post addressing pains around block storage.