Storage tone: what networked storage can learn from consumer product goods - Storage Networking

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2003 by Alan Kessler

"COMMENTARY. The Editors invite other perspectives to the views presented herein."

In today's business world, technology plays a significant role in every facet of the enterprise, resulting in a much more complex IT environment. Unfortunately, much of the technology affecting our lives isn't always the most straightforward or easy to understand and use. Today's organizations are faced with increasing amounts of information, decreasing budgets and too few resources, and yet the technology options available are not always capable of helping them run their business successfully.

Consumer products, like the handheld PDA, have grasped this notion of providing low-cost, simple and easy-to-use products that do exactly what consumers expect them to. Users want instant-on, always-accessible data from their handheld devices and that's what they get. They want intuitive user interfaces that don't require a manual before use. And they want something they can afford.

The same rules apply for a networked storage environment, a more complex, cumbersome and expensive technology. New storage solutions that are smart, intuitive and affordable are quickly becoming a reality and offering businesses IT advantages that just a few years ago were not available.

Storage Tone

As IT systems become more complex, expensive and difficult to maintain, the need for technology that is always on, and that can dynamically manage and self-heal with minimal human intervention is growing. New network storage solutions that address similar requirements to consumer products leverage this notion to provide users with instant access to their data.

Similar to a phone's dial tone, storage tone simply means that a user's storage solution is always on and ready. More importantly, the data stored on their storage network is always accessible, from anywhere, even if it is accessed wirelessly. In a world with storage tone, the user has instant access to stored files on the network at the click of a button.

To achieve this new notion of storage tone, vendors need to develop storage solutions that are much smarter, more intuitive and affordable than existing solutions. By making storage solutions that are available, reliable, self-diagnosing, self-healing and cost-effective like storage tone, we can provide users with what they want and increase the speed of adoption, enabling a more ubiquitous, plug-and-play networked storage environment.

Smarter Storage

Vendors and users look at the speed of adoption for any market critically alike. How long it takes to sell something is directly related to how easy and affordable that something is--and the goal generally should be to minimize time to adoption. For network storage, successful, widespread, and rapid adoption will occur only if solutions are designed to apply to a broader audience. These solutions, therefore, need to not only be easy to use and affordable, they also need to be smarter.

Network storage systems to date have been largely successful in high-end, expensive environments. This has afforded IT organizations the ability to closely manage their storage with skilled, expensive and highly talented IT professionals such as storage architects and operations professionals. These experts have been necessary because today's systems, while dependable, are expensive, highly complex and in many ways not interoperable or compatible with other systems in the network. They are islands of network storage and those islands are expensive real estate indeed.

What has allowed today's omnipresent consumer technologies, which first entered via the high-end and expensive commercial markets, to become so broadly adopted by consumers? A focus on simplicity, usability and low cost. Interestingly enough, the focus on simplicity is counter-intuitive. Simple is not always easy to do when it comes to driving sophisticated technology like network storage to the masses. It is hard to make something useful yet truly simple. Reflect upon the level of sophisticated technology in some of today's newer computing solutions and it's easy to understand the amount of thought, design, engineering and human effort required to make something truly ready for broad-based markets.

We in the storage industry must accept and rise to this same challenge.

How Do We Make Network Storage Simply Smarter?

Smarter solutions will leverage established and broadly adopted industry standards, such as IP, to increase the user's ability to easily manage their complex storage environments. They'll also offer easier-to-use management capabilities for handling routine storage tasks. For example, look at the amount of time and effort required using today's solutions to increase volume size in a networked environment. A typical timeline for this type of job requires the following steps:

* Plan in advance the proposed changes--usually one to two days.

* Contact the vendor to obtain the updated configuration file(s).

* Schedule for network downtime--typically four hours.

* Notify the user community of the scheduled downtime.