Compaq Bets On SANs: ENSA Is Their Ace In The Hole - interview with Darren Thomas of Compaq's Storage Group Division - Company Business and Marketing

Computer Technology Review, July, 1999 by Joshua Piven

These are not the days of wine and roses for Compaq Computer Corp. Over the last six months, the Houston-based PC giant has seen its CEO and CFO resign; its profits wane and its stock value plummet; its PC market share continue to erode, and its expensive mergers ruffle feathers and force layoffs. Combine all these ingredients with difficulty in mastering direct distribution and you have the recipe for another difficult half ahead for the PC king.

But fortunes in the computer industry can change as quickly as stock prices, and past problems are often little indicator of future performance. Compaq is betting on several new technologies which it hopes will position the company at the forefront of technical innovation as the millennium draws to a close.

In particular, Compaq is bullish on SANs. As both a storage and an enterprise systems company, Compaq sees huge potential in the demand for high performance storage, backup, and disaster recovery solutions that can be distributed throughout the entire enterprise--without sacrificing speed and reliability. Such is the promise of the SAN. But perhaps even more important, for the company that can achieve the feat, great opportunity exists for simplifying and universalizing storage management. This is the charter for Compaq's ambitious Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) strategy, which was announced in December and which the company hopes will be fully functional by by this time next year.

With both ENSA and SANs, Compaq hopes to make storage a more flexible, more reliable, and more accessible shared resource across the enterprise. To learn more about the company's plans for both technologies, I recently spoke with Darren Thomas, vice president of the Multi-Vendor Business Unit of Compaq's Storage Products Division.

JOSHUA: What is Compaq's vision of the SAN as a technology?

DARREN: SANs have generally been defined as storage connected behind servers, and there has been lots of public debate about what is and is not a SAN. In reality, there are many types of SAN, from a redundant pathway with high availability and NSPF to a long-distance connection with a single point of failure. These look different, but are still SANs. With ENSA and SANs, our view is that storage should be a utility on the network, and by utility I include all three types of storage: device to server (direct connect), device to network (NAS) and Multi-device, multi-server (SAN).

JOSHUA: When you say "utility," this does not sound like a storage-centric vision, it sounds like a network-centric vision. Is this the case?

DARREN: By utility, I mean that wherever you put storage, in whatever form it is connected, you will be able to access it through software on the network. This is a vision of automatic, scalable, transparent storage, separated by distance but still in the same virtual pool.

JOSHUA: If SAN-based storage, as a technology, is dependent on the network, why are the large networking companies to hesitant to invest both time and money in SANs?

DARREN: Networking companies want IP [Internet Protocol]. That's their expertise and that's what you see them concentrating on now with new technologies like Voice over IP. SANs use Fibre Channel, which means FCP, and until there is a switch to IP, they see little value they can add. I have talked to the big networking companies, and they simply don't think they can bring value until FC uses IP.

JOSHUA: This is an interesting point, because when I spoke with a 3Com official, he told me that he believes the dollars projected for SANs will go to the disk drive makers, not to the companies providing the SAN network infrastructure. Do you agree?

DARREN: I think to some extent that's true. What you have in a backup SAN is basically a version of the 80/20 rule, with 80 percent of the costs going to the devices, the servers and the arrays, and very little going to the network. I mean, in enterprise backup solution, you have a $70,000 DLT and relatively expensive servers, and for the interface you have maybe some fibre cables and a FC hub, which at the most cost a few thousand dollars. The total cost of the infrastructure is very low, comparatively.

JOSHUA: But doesn't the SAN-both as a technology and as a "movement"-need the networking companies on board, if for nothing else than for exposure and to move storage out of the proverbial basement?

DARREN: I think what you're seeing is the networking expertise being provided by the smaller start-ups, companies like Gadzoox, like the Brocades and the Vixels that have the fibre expertise to offer, and I think they have been very successful. Other companies like Compaq, IBM, and HP who have the resources contribute to the R&D and help with things like marketing.

JOSHUA: Storage is the industry's dirty little secret, the crazy aunt in the attic. Is the SAN the technology that is finally going to put storage on the map and give it mindshare among customers?

DARREN: Believe it or not, we have been seeing a major shift in our customers' views about storage. They are now spending 2-5x the dollars on storage that they are spending on networking technology, and they are requesting quotes on storage separate from servers. The first question they ask is about the OS, then about storage, and then about the server, and in many cases the server decision will be based on their choice of storage. In the past, storage was almost never a strategic decision, and now it is, even to the point of coming before the server. Servers now actually differentiate themselves via storage.