Storage /

Reason for urgency

By Anne Skamarock
Network World Storage Newsletter, 02/19/01

In last week's newsletter, I was given pause for thought about how immature the market for storage-area networking technologies is today. Many CIOs and IT managers may think, " I want none of that! " But before turning your back on these technologies, let me give you some very good reasons why you need to begin implementing them today.

You have heard me, in this newsletter, profess the benefits of SANs. By implementing a SAN infrastructure, customers will gain flexible, scalable, and available storage solutions. Even though SAN technology has to evolve to become all that it can be, I continue to promote these benefits. The management software that will enable these benefits has not been completed yet.

Because software is still being developed to solve these storage management issues, there is no better time than now for you to require vendors to work with you to solve your specific business issues relating to storage. If you - as a CIO or IT manager - are wrestling with storage, you are not focusing on " the business. " My recommendation is to begin to architect, plan and implement a long-term infrastructure upgrade from the direct server-attached environment you currently have operational, to a network storage environment.

" Why should I start now and not wait for a more mature technology? " I hear you asking. I can sum that up with two words: competitive edge. Even though the technology is not mature, there are specific applications where many customers are gaining huge benefits. One such application is backup. More SANs are deployed today to address backup and recovery than any other single application.

Let me walk you through a scenario. Your competition has implemented a SAN to make backup more efficient, and you have not. Backup is one thing on his list of IT pain he can now check off as covered. The next thing your competition adds to this initial infrastructure is virtual volumes and storage pools, the ability to pool capacity and dynamically allocate that capacity to an application as the need arises. Well, you think this is pretty hot stuff and want to implement it also. Great - except that none of your IT professionals have any experience with SANs and don't really know where to start. Your competition has spent the time up-front to build its internal expertise in SANs and has partnered with their vendors of choice to build a solution that fits the business need. Your competition has probably been able to attract top IT personnel with the promised exposure to emerging technologies.

Who do you think will be primed to take advantage of all the storage management software capabilities when they are available? Your competition has gained the competitive edge by slowly evolving their infrastructure to take advantage of these technologies as they are available, growing their internal expertise, and partnering with chosen vendors to gain operational efficiencies never known before. Can you buy into these technologies at a later date? Of course you can, but at what price? And don't forget maintenance charges in that.