Right Data, Right Now

The best storage systems, used properly, can make a business run better. Millennium Chemicals Inc., a company with 4,000 employees around the world, learned that last year when it deployed storage-management software from OSI Software Inc. to replace Excel spreadsheets used for recording and sharing manufacturing data in monthly reports. "Site directors wanted daily reports they could look at before they drove to the plant," says Steve Sarnecki, global director for process controls. OSI's management software collects and replicates data, which is fed into an SAP R/3 system that Millennium uses to manage global plant information. "Now engineers, operators, and plant management share data so they can make more-accurate decisions in a more-timely fashion," he says.

OSI is working with Millennium to get the software to manage more than storage; later this year, it will monitor the real-time costs of production and set off alarms when pumps need servicing so they don't break down.

The growing sophistication of storage-management software will continue this year as business-technology managers demand greater control over their data in order to make more-informed decisions. The software will gain new capabilities in the coming years as leading storage vendors such as EMC, IBM, Storage Technology, and Veritas Software introduce products and add features to existing management tools. "We still see growth in storage software because there are still problems managing the storage architecture," says Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer at Veritas.

Those problems are more important because of storage's key role in providing real-time information, as well as monitoring application performance, supporting round-the-clock transactions, and ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery. In the past, storage was merely part of the hardware that came with a computer, and it did little more than hold software and data. Now, better management software has made storage a more integral part of IT architectures. Vendors are adding features so their storage-management products can map, monitor, and interact with all of a company's storage resources, regardless of the maker. Visualization and virtualization features let administrators control that storage as if it were a single resource, resulting in fewer half-empty hard disks. New features also help managers better analyze how storage works with specific applications to improve performance.

In the coming year, storage vendors will roll out software designed to make storage less expensive, easier to manage, more useful in providing real-time information, quicker at restoring systems after a disturbance or disaster, and more efficient in storing data and delivering the right information to the right person at the right time. Indeed, sales of storage-management software, which grew from $5.3 billion in 2000 to $8.5 billion last year, should hit $16.7 billion in 2005, Gartner Dataquest predicts. EMC, IBM, and Veritas are the leaders, with double-digit market share; other vendors each have less than 5% of the market.

On the hardware side, market leaders are EMC; Hitachi, which bought IBM's hard-disk operations; and Hewlett-Packard/Compaq. Because of falling prices, companies spend less on storage hardware; sales of disk storage fell from $17.4 billion in 2001 to $13.3 billion last year, according to IDC. The sales decline, however, is mostly attributed to a steady drop in the price of a megabyte of storage, by about 40% a year for the past several years.

Storage may be getting cheaper, but it's still too costly a resource to waste. That was a lesson learned by Rod Lucero, chief architect at Conseco Finance Corp., when he deployed SANsymphony from DataCore Software Corp. last year. "I lacked easy management of the storage infrastructure before, and we wasted between 35% and 40% of all storage," he says. "DataCore allowed us to drag and drop icons to allocate the storage, saved us huge amounts of time, and even allowed us to reclaim unused storage." That's important for the financial-services company, which has been struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Conseco has more than 14,000 employees, $38.2 billion in assets under management, and 500 terabytes of storage. Lucero calls storage a "core system" and says it's one of his basic building blocks when he designs an IT architecture. Conseco uses EMC storage to support servers running HP-UX, Linux, and Windows.

Like its competitors, Conseco is using the Internet to provide service around the clock. It needs real-time information and tough security, including identity management and authorization, to do that effectively, especially when business partners are involved. "All the back-end systems must tie together," Lucero says.

Because storage can help companies integrate back-end systems, front-end systems, applications, and data, many businesses would benefit from appointing storage architects to make better use of their storage resources and pick the best type of storage and transport technology, says Gary Bloom, chairman and CEO of Veritas, which specializes in storage-management software. Veritas plans to integrate technology gained through recent acquisitions so its software can manage and improve the performance of servers as well as storage. "We have heterogeneous capabilities without a hardware anchor," Bloom says. "Our software will reduce complexity, reduce labor costs, and make more efficient use of existing storage."

That's a claim many vendors make. Hewlett-Packard has released storage-management software, called Active Management, designed to let companies provision, run, and recover data faster, says Bob Schultz, VP of marketing at HP's network-storage solutions unit. Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. promises the Storage Manager application this summer, which will "guarantee the recovery of data with whatever hardware customers have and also produce performance and provisioning information," says Scott Kennedy, VP of business development. Systems-management software vendor BMC Software Inc. plans to introduce a version of its Patrol Storage Manager this summer that it says will cut down deployment time and automate the setup and provisioning of new equipment and users.

The growing high-end capabilities of storage-management software may put it on a collision course -- or consolidation course -- with other infrastructure-management systems. But until that happens, the need for real-time data to improve business operations is pushing many companies to upgrade their storage systems.

At financial-services firm KeyCorp, "many events have to be in real time," says Bob Dutile, executive VP of technology services. For instance, the bank has customers who use debit cards at 4 p.m. and want to see those transactions reflected when they check their bank balances online later that evening.

KeyCorp, which uses products from StorageTek, also conducts business across multiple time zones and on a Web site that receives as many as 600,000 hits a day. "More and more batch processes are becoming real time because it reduces fraud and minimizes uncontrolled float," Dutile says. His goal is to eliminate "waiting three days for the wrong signature."

Another factor fueling the drive to modernize storage infrastructures is a desire to make data backup more of a real-time process. More businesses want to back up and protect data in real time in the same manner that they're trying to use the data for real-time business processes.

Together, the need for better storage management, real-time business processes, and disaster-proof business continuity is helping to produce a wave of storage products from tech vendors. "We see the need for more and more of a mix between consolidated and distributed data," says Mark Lewis, executive VP and chief technology officer at EMC. "You want data centralized for integrity and security, but it still needs to be distributed." The storage market leader just introduced a new version of its flagship Symmetrix system that offers more capacity and faster performance. EMC also plans to enhance its software to do a better job of managing a mix of storage products from a variety of vendors.

Network Appliance Inc. also is betting this year on helping customers integrate their various types of storage. The vendor has been among the most successful at selling simple appliances that store and move files faster than general-purpose servers. Now it's trying to crack the higher-margin, high-end storage segment. A deal with Hitachi Data Systems, a leader in disk arrays, gives Network Appliance and its partners a way to integrate storage area networks with a network-attached storage gateway product. That will let data travel throughout a storage infrastructure that uses both Fibre Channel and IP transport technologies.

Market-leading vendors such as Hitachi Data Systems and IBM also plan to roll out this summer policy-based management software that's designed to make the management of storage resources more automated. The software will let companies set rules to trigger actions once certain thresholds are hit. Smaller vendors are also delivering innovation, such as CommVault Systems Inc.'s Quick Recovery and Data Duplication to help customers move blocks of data across long distances and recover from disasters. Chris Van Wagoner, CommVault's director of marketing, expects more businesses to invest money in such systems this year, partly in response to a federal government recommendation that backup sites be at least 200 miles apart.

Accounting firm Grant Thornton LLP's New York office was just four blocks from the World Trade Center when terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Nobody was hurt, and the company was back up and running from Chicago in six minutes. This year, Grant Thornton is ready to implement a hub for business continuity that will involve offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York. Each will be large enough for 1,000 people.

Dave Johnson, director of technology at the accounting firm, plans to replicate data among those sites using a 4700 storage system from EMC and a tape library from StorageTek. Long-term but little-used data will be archived in an off-site storage facility. Johnson would like to mirror, or replicate, data during the day, not overnight, and he's looking at software from CommVault and NSI Software. "I'm still deciding when to transfer data to the tape library, and then when to secure it" off-site, he says. "I'll probably keep 30 days worth of data hot."

Dorsey & Whitney LLP, an international law firm with more than 800 attorneys, is looking for a way to provide up-to-the-minute information to its Shanghai office, which has grown substantially in the past six months. It's considering NetDocuments from NetVoyage Corp., but hasn't made a final decision. "We're trying to have hot online backup," says Scott Perrin, Dorsey & Whitney's manager of network services. "If we succeed, we'll be operating in real time across the globe." The law firm also is concerned about operating if a disaster hits an office. It's using gear from Dell Computer and EMC for storage and business continuity, including an EMC 4700 system that contains 2.1 terabytes of data. "We'll also have redundant boxes over the course of the year," Perrin says. That will entail a mix of Dell PowerVault 660 SAN systems and Dell NAS 715 appliances. "If the network is down, people can access documents over the Web," he says.

In the search for efficiency, managers want to benefit from business-continuity systems, even if no disaster hits. Indoff Inc., a distributor of business products, achieved enough of a return from an HP system that it has ordered an MSA 1000 SAN system for the third quarter to support deployment of an enterprise resource planning application from J.D. Edwards & Co. Indoff used to shut down its systems for about eight hours each night to back up a legacy financial application. "With HP Snapshot technology, we have the shut-down window down to about an hour and a half," says Shawn Faulkingham, senior network engineer. "It lets our field people operate for practically 24 hours a day."

There are still plenty of question marks for the future of storage technology, including emerging standards, new competitors, and the role of services.

Many storage vendors plan to introduce products that use the iSCSI specification, a data transport technology that's supposed to become a standard in the first half of this year. ISCSI is designed to let large blocks of data travel long distances across an IP network or the Internet, which could reduce the cost of storage systems even more. However, CIOs aren't spending much time on iSCSI just yet. They're waiting for the standard to be finalized, and vendors to deliver the first generation of products based on it.

Human error often made backup and recovery difficult, says Hill, director of the office of communications services for the Small Business Administration. Another wild card is how important storage services -- already popular with small businesses -- will become. Iron Mountain Inc., a company that stores tape drives at undisclosed locations underground to help companies recover from disasters, recently started storing data online for customers that want quick access to backup data in case of outages at their primary sites. It also will serve as a company's primary data storage site. One not-so-small customer taking advantage of Iron Mountain's services is the U.S. Small Business Administration. "We were doing backup and recovery ourselves with tape drives and information resource managers at each site," says , director of the office of communications services. "We always ran into human error and sometimes couldn't recover information, so we wanted to remove that from the picture." The Small Business Administration turned to Iron Mountain for backup, recovery, outside data storage, and data archival at $35 to $50 per gigabyte. The SBA is storing a couple of hundred gigabytes with the vendor and is able to recover lost files within two minutes.

New vendors and technologies will also shape storage choices. PC market leader Dell Computer entered the high-end storage business last year through a partnership with EMC. This year, it's partnering with data-switch vendors Brocade and McData and host bus adapter vendors Emulex and Q Logic to deliver data over storage networks via features that include locking and encryption. "We hope to lock down who has access to the data on the network," says Gerald Longoria, Dell's product marketing manager for storage networks.

Data switch vendor Vixel Corp. takes a different approach. Later this year, it plans to introduce a 20-port switch the size of a chip that can go inside servers or storage systems. Several of the leading server and storage vendors are working with or talking to the vendor about incorporating Vixel's technology into their products, says Beth White, VP of marketing. The switch could reduce the workload on hard disks and monitor their performance. "We think we'll increase availability up to 20%, reducing latency and downtime related to hard-disk drives," White says. "We'll isolate rogue drives, diagnose drives, and do health monitoring."

What's happening in the storage market reflects two megatrends in business technology: the demand for better information that's closer to real time and the continued pressure on IT departments to lower costs by running more efficiently. "Storage needs are growing faster than hard disks are getting cheaper. And storage resources are growing faster than storage-management productivity is improving," says Rob Nieboer, director of business management for growth markets at vendor StorageTek. "For customers, that's a double whammy." It's up to storage-technology vendors to help soften the blow.

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