IT users interviewed at Storage Networking World here this week see the demand for more data storage capacity outpacing their ability to consolidate their infrastructures and improve systems performance. That conflict, they said, comes even as backup and recovery windows are shrinking. Other storage managers at the event, which began Tuesday, said they are moving away from individual storage-component purchases so they can focus on architectures to handle specific business needs -- not just individual user requests for increased storage capacity.
"My last challenge to the industry as a buyer is to see how fast can you make (storage) cheaper and make storage retrieval faster and occupy less space in my data center, because I"m out of room," said Bob Eicholz, vice president of corporate development at Efilm LLC in Los Angeles.
Efilm performs digital processing for films such as The Bourne Supremacy, Lemony Snicket"s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Finding Neverland, all of which are stored on a 200TB+ storage-area network (SAN) from Silicon Graphics Inc.
Eicholz said part of the problem he sees with data capacity growth is that there are no tools to dynamically assign capacity to users on demand. "No storage is enough," Eicholz said.
Joel White, lead IT architect at Allstate Insurance Co. in Northbrook, Ill., agreed that managing storage takes too much effort. "You can"t set it and forget it," he said.
One of the main roadblocks to a utility storage architecture remains interoperability, IT managers said. Several users said they"ve moved away from vendors who overestimate how well their products perform with those of competitors and are "voting with their wallets" by insisting that vendors prove interoperability first.
Bob Shinn, a principal in the IT department at State Street Global Advisors, the investment arm of State Street Corp. in Boston, compared "blatant lying" about what works together in a SAN to holding users hostage by forcing homogeneous storage architectures on them -- and making it costly to introduce other vendors" products.
Shinn, who is responsible for managing the unit"s storage systems, said his IT department had to change the way it thought about technology. Instead of buying the latest products based on speeds and feeds, it now considers what business problem is being solved. Last fall, State Street consolidated seven SANs into a single centralized location using switches from McData Corp. and storage from EMC Corp. Shinn said his focus now is on creating a business-oriented services model with sophisticated chargeback capability.
Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., pointed out to attendees in a crowded auditorium that Network Appliance Inc. was demonstrating how its latest virtualization technology, the V-Series file-server head, can support EMC"s Clariion arrays for its back-end storage.
"EMC"s position was that "We don"t support it,"" Duplessie said. "They should be nice guys and support it."
Meanwhile, 10 vendors, including IBM, NetApp, EMC, Sun Microsystems Inc., Veritas Software Corp. and Hitachi Data Systems Corp., announced support for the most recent release of the Storage Networking Industry Association"s storage interoperability specification -- SMI-S Version 1.0.2.
The newest version of the protocol allows interoperability between storage architectures and storage resource management software, which performs automatic discovery of hardware and performance monitoring of networks and equipment.
In addition, the protocol will expand to include interoperability specifications between Internet SCSI devices and network-attached storage arrays, said Rick Bauer, SNIA"s technical director.
Chris Wilson, a storage architect at MCI Inc., said the specification should help him get services to his internal clients faster and ties in with MCI"s model for automated services delivery.
"With multiple proprietary interfaces, MCI"s technical experts are forced to learn a new language for each new device, which is inefficient for us, costly for us and time-consuming," Wilson said. "It"s really all about us servicing our customers."