Network Storage '99 Conference PART 2 - News Briefs

Computer Technology Review, Oct, 1999

THE FIRST PART OF THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE AUGUST ISSUE OF STORAGE INC.

One of the highlights of each year's Network Storage Conference is the Executive Roundtable, moderated by the Conference organizer--Farid Neema of Peripheral Concepts. This year's panel included Dave Weiss of StorageTek, Mark Leslie of Veritas, Jeff Allen of Sun, Marilyn Edling of Hewlett-Packard, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, and Kevin Daly of ATL. Bob Fads of American Protective Services joined Farid as co-moderator. The session went something like this:

JEFF: Businesses are changing. You hear the term disintermediation. So, the thing that I've seen is that many of the IT organizations I deal with are moving or have moved from traditional expense-based ITs to "generate revenues for me." That changes your philosophy also when now you're being asked to generate revenue as opposed to just being a cost-based organization. The moment you have to start generating revenue that says I need to provide certain levels of service to change the way I operate my organization because now when the call comes in, it's not just 50,000 dollars or 50GB, or 5,000 whatever it is. It's now; I need to generate this revenue and everything's riding on it. So, it's a whole different mindset that's starting to take place that I've seen shifted; that's really put a demand on dealing with these levels of service that have to be provided.

DAVE: I think that another thing that we've seen, particularly over the last year or so, is the great deal more sensitivity to the exposure that CIOs and IS managers have as a result of interconnectivity Both, because things like e-mail can be vectors of threat to the storage system and, on the other side, because interruptions cannot be kept in the family. They now have a very wide range of effects. It's bad enough to go see the CEO when you have a shutdown; seeing the lawyers is a whole other layer of anxieties. I think the sensitivity to this kind of a problem has really grown over the last year or so.

BOB: What are the major changes, challenges, and benefits that I, as user, should look forward to in the next couple of years? Tell me exactly from the industry that you represent. How are you going to help insure that CIO doesn't really stand for "Career Is Over"?

JEFF: I think there's one area that I'm most interested in. It is getting to the way we have service level agreements we can agree with. We can enforce policies that help manage and automate a lot of the jobs that are really hard for administrators today. I mean, if you just consider the typical application environment where you have Oracle, Veritas, and Sun, it doesn't matter what is in the mix. There's a lot of difference to keep track of in terms of keeping those applications up and running. I think it's the gain of service level agreements in place and getting a set of standards in. I look forward to see really trying to drive a lot of those to get us to a standards base because that really is a way we're going to simplify a lot of the problems we have. It's a lot of hard work.

BOB: Anyone else care to comment?

MARILYN: I agree with what Jeff has said and I think that what's going to happen over the next two years is the actual deployment of a lot of what people have been talking about. I think that requires a partnership not just of vendors delivering it, but also working with the customers and getting a very good understanding of what your needs are so that the solutions that we bring to market are tuned to that. A way of really propelling this technology deployment is making sure that we have standards and also a recognition that everyone is living in a heterogeneous environment. They're not one vendor's products in any of the data centers anymore. It is those mainframes and open systems; and a push for standards and competition will really move this faster. So, it's available for the customers.

MARK: One of the things we're doing at Veritas is providing a product set that we believe is a heterogeneous scalable clustering capability and what we're trying to do is really in a sense commoditize high availability, If that works, and I believe it will, I think we're going to see availability to become ingrained in the industry. Maybe another way to say it, kind of a backward way to say it, I think high availability is the killer app for storage area networking. I think it's a little driven by this e-commerce Internet, which is moving every business in the world to the highest availability.

BOB: Oh, I would agree with that. In fact, quoting from Internet Week, their comment was because basically of the large technical barriers to adoption, SANs are one to two years way from becoming mainstream. I think from what I'm hearing at least that we've got many of the solutions in the pipeline, but, again, for the company like ours to openly embrace it, we really need it to be rock solid and, of course, inexpensive. That does not necessarily go hand in glove. Any other comments? The last question that I'd like to ask in this particular series and we talked throughout the day of very large corporations and small businesses, but how do their storage requirements really differ? Do the small companies require a higher degree of storage management than a large corporation? Or is it just the opposite?