High-End Hijinks -- Renewed excitement about high-end storage brings with it corporate conflict and customer confusion
Chris Bucholtz
High-end storage systems used to be the answer to an insomniac's prayers. Thinking about those huge, expensive and usually reliable systems was dull enough, and looking at the EMC- and IBM-dominated market was even more of a snoozer.
But today, the choice of storage systems, as well as the drama surrounding its makers, is keeping solution providers awake at night.
"To say it's interesting right now would be an understatement," says John Perhay, senior system designer for Midway, a Chanhasset, Minn.-based solution provider. "Not only is there a lot more to think about regarding the vendors, but the users are finding new ways to use the products. We've had to throw out our preconceived ideas of where storage should go and who [should] provide it."
The turnabout came as the Internet became a transforming force for business; data has never before been generated in such volume or valued as such a critically important asset. Overnight, the choice of a storage vendor went from a simple, end-of-solution decision to a potential career-maker or breaker.
At the same time, the stakes were raised for vendors. Storage now accounts for 50 percent to 60 percent of the revenue in the average IT account, according to Boston-based Aberdeen Group. And as those stakes became higher, more vendors have moved in for a piece of the action.
Add to that the rapid acceptance of network attached storage, the long-awaited maturity of storage area networks and the promise offered by storage service providers. What once was a somnambulant sector is now a truly manic market with which solution providers must come to terms.
"At the high end, the demand isn't entirely based on capacity," Perhay says. "It's based on the need to be available 24 hours a day, to be able to do quick backups and to split data off for data warehousing without being down. Only the high-end systems can meet that need."
Muddy Waters
Adding to the confusion of this landscape is the fact that those high-end devices-from Compaq, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and IBM-are all solid, reliable devices. They're differentiated not by basic functionality, but by much more subtle issues of manageability, flexibility and degree of vendor support.
Ironically, the majority of revenue generated around storage by those large players doesn't come from the hardware itself. Becoming a provider of very large storage devices requires an expertise in developing storage management software-or in partnering with companies with this strength. Stamford, Conn.-based Dataquest predicts the total market for storage management software will balloon to $14.7 billion by 2004, up from $4.2 billion last year.
"Management software provides the best opportunity for these vendors to demonstrate practical differences between each other's offerings," says John Webster, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based market research firm Illuminata. "All too often, though, brute strength and pure performance are used to promote one over another, and that muddies the waters for the people making decisions."
Those muddy waters are, indeed, making storage choices difficult for solution providers and would-be purchasers alike. "You can understand the stress they're experiencing as storage grows to represent a larger part of their budgets," says David Hill, senior storage industry analyst at Aberdeen Group, Boston. "There are so many choices, so many good choices, but it's very hard to sort the facts and reality from marketing and sales."
As the Storage Turns
Reality, of course, can be dull, and the players at the high end are loath to return to the doldrums of three years ago. In many ways, the market resembles a very expensive soap opera. The epitome of that came last year, when HP and EMC severed ties after HP stood up its longtime storage partner in favor of reselling Hitachi's Freedom Storage 7700E.
For six years, HP and EMC had a tidy arrangement in place. HP's sales and marketing forces pushed solutions based around HP's servers, with EMC Symmetrix systems as the storage for those solutions. EMC provided a reliable piece of the puzzle for HP, serving as a founding member of HP's "Five Nines" alliance to work toward 99.999 percent uptime. When the two companies renewed their agreement in January 1999, all seemed blissful.
Then, in May 1999, HP jilted EMC when it announced its plans to resell Hitachi's 7700E, with modified management software, as the SureStore E Disk Array MC256. "Overnight, HP's sales force went from pointing out problems with the 7700E and praising the Symmetrix to the heights, to trashing the Symmetrix and praising the 7700E," says Colin Rankine, an analyst at Giga Information Group, Cambridge, Mass.
EMC sued HP over the name of its new storage subsystem, claiming that HP salespeople were referring to the box as the "SureStore E MC256," leading customers to believe they were still getting EMC boxes. The suit resulted in a name change to the XP256.
"We established a beachhead with the XP256," says David Scott, general manager of HP's Extended Platform Storage Operation. "The XP256 helps protect our installed HP-UX base, and it finally gave customers a choice among very large storage systems."
Cast of Characters Grows
Solution providers, meanwhile, were left to weed through the rhetoric to get useful information about support and service. Even the Five Nines group complained about the abruptness and hostility of the announcement.
"HP basically put a gun to our head," says Mike Malone, owner and founder of Atlanta-based solution provider CTS. "They said it was either EMC or HP. For us, that was an easy decision...EMC ended up being our path, and we haven't sold a single XP256 since."
Just as the EMC-HP brouhaha started to settle, "Shark", IBM's Enterprise Storage Server, bit into the market, followed by a rash of Compaq Storage Works releases. Despite its relationship with HP, Hitachi continued to market the 7700E under its own brand and, this spring, released an upgraded product, the Lightning 9900 (which is being resold by HP as the SureStore XP512). Sun Microsystems also tried to position itself as a high-end storage vendor with the release of its SunStor device, although analysts say the product is a better fit at the midrange.
All those announcements had one thing in common: They bashed EMC. "Beating up on EMC is in vogue these days, but it's distracting and, as a result, most of these vendors are doing a very poor job of describing why people should buy their storage systems," Illuminata's Webster says.
For all the abuse heaped on EMC by its competitors, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company still controls a substantial part of the high-end market. "The market leader always has a target painted on its back," says Jim Rothnie, senior vice president of product marketing at EMC. "We're used to it."
Although rivals relish rehashing the age of EMC's hardware architecture, the company has recently refreshed the Symmetrix line. In April, the company unveiled the Symmetrix 8000 family, a new line of EMC storage systems boasting a 19.1-TB maximum capacity, along with a host of new management tools.
Even as EMC works to boost the size and capabilities of its high-end systems, IBM's 11-TB Shark is making inroads because of its flexibility. According to Denise Buonaiuto, vice president of business partner solutions at IBM, installations of Shark are equally divided among Unix, Windows NT and 2000 and Linux. "We're seeing a lot of installations in Fortune 100 companies where EMC is already installed," Buonaiuto says. "In that situation, it's easy to explain the differences between Shark and other machines. So far, it has performed as advertised."
The newest heavyweight is Hitachi's Lightning 9900. With a raw maximum capacity of 37.3 TB, or 27.5 TB in a RAID-5 configuration, Lightning is the performance leader. Hitachi's strategy revolves around making OEM arrangements with other vendors, like HP, which is rebranding the device as the XP512.
However impressive all those technical improvements may be, communicating their value to solution providers and customers will be even more vital. While pure numbers are a starting point for evaluation, RAID levels, data backup approaches and other implementation-related factors determine how much capacity a mass-storage unit really has, and management software is the key to accessing that data. The mechanics of storage are well-understood; now vendors need to work on the niceties of educating customers on the differences between their systems in real-world terms.
"We have a lot of choices of boxes filled with round, brown spinning stuff," CTS' Malone says. "Our customers are not looking at the numbers around speeds and feeds. They want to make sure they have the software to use the stuff, a high level of backup and the ability to make data a key part of their businesses. Ultimately, it's not about technical issues-it's about business issues."
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Deciding Between NAS And SAN
Raw storage capacity isn't the only factor IT managers look at, analysts say. Emerging storage strategies also play into the decision.
Network attached storage (NAS) has migrated up from the LAN space, becoming a favored strategy for adding capacity quickly. NAS devices attach directly to an existing network. A file system is located and managed on the NAS device, and data is transferred to clients over industry-standard network protocols (e.g., TCP/IP or IPX) using industry-standard file-sharing protocols (e.g., SMB/CIFS, NCP, AFP, NFS or HTTP). This intelligence on the NAS device enables data-sharing among heterogeneous network clients.
That sort of sharing is the goal of storage area networks (SANs), though in a SAN the intelligence is centralized in a storage device or dedicated computer rather than residing in each device. SANs, which rely on Fibre Channel connectivity, enable managers to pool storage resources into a single, large virtual storage device. These pools of storage systems interact with pools of servers over long distances, with no need for point-to-point connections.
Until the middle of last year, SANs were hampered by a lack of standards and a tendency for large vendors to create SAN architectures that were incompatible with other vendors' products, effectively neutralizing the value of the strategy. Since then, strategies from EMC, HP and IBM have evolved to be more inclusive, and solutions that get around incompatibilities from smaller vendors have begun to hit the market.
"When you're making the choice, you need to look at just what you want," says David Hill, senior storage industry analyst at Aberdeen Group. "Hitachi, with the Lightning 9900, delivers the very best performance, but you're going to pay a price premium. Compaq offers the best price/performance, but the capacity isn't as great as others...EMC is the market leader, and trails in some technical areas, but has a very capable sales force and world-class service and support and other features like management software...You can't narrow the choice unless you know what sort of strength your [client] puts its highest priority on."-C.B.
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