The looming SAN storm in the SMB market part 2; continuation of the roundtable discussion on the emerging SAN market for small to medium-sized businesses sponsored by Computer Associates, Dell, Emulex, Intel and Microsoft

Computer Technology Review, August, 2004

Marrone-Hurley: Anders, you had mentioned before, from a management perspective, that you think that there might be different requirements in the market. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit more?

Lofgren: Well, just at a very high level, it's back to what some other panelists said, it's really that they don't need the "137 features and functions." They just need the five. In many respects, it's a subset of the functionalities that the people in the data center have.

But I want to go back to this point about technology. If we are having a discussion of Fibre Channel versus iSCSI with a SMB customer, we've lost already--we've failed. It's a losing discussion; you can't win it. Just by our own definition, we're saying they don't have storage administrators. They have system administrators who do storage part time in kind of a hallway conversation. So if we're talking about Fibre Channel and iSCSI, it should be absolutely irrelevant to the end user. It's just a protocol we're using. What we're selling them is a solution. That's what we need to get to. Part of that is, as Marc pointed out, standards. Standards will get us there because then we don't have to deal with the interoperability issues that we did with Fibre Channel. But I think that when we start to talk about technology and we admit that they're not technology people (not specifically storage people) then we've got a real problem.

But back to your original question on the feature functions, I think that it's all about understanding what the customer experience is and what things they are using. So for example, lots of SMB customers have Windows, and a lot of them are using Exchange. So it would behoove us to fully integrate with applications like Exchange and make sure that we're serving the needs of those particular customers through the applications. That's also very key in the data center, obviously. With SMBs, however, you've got to deal with the ease of use issues because they're expecting it to be very easy; whereas, if you're talking to the people in the data center, they don't mind going through a little bit of work. And some of them actually enjoy it in some way.

[laughter]

Marrone-Hurley: Well, what's interesting is that ESG has just recently done a study on the future of data protection technologies, and exactly what you said came out--across the board--and we were able to get SMB and enterprise responses. And the number one application that needed the fastest recovery time was Exchange. It didn't matter if you were a small to medium business or an enterprise. So you're right, you have to be able to address the needs. The needs are the same. But now you have to provide solutions that address all these other issues that we've talked about--the low cost, the ease of use, the abstraction--and not have that technology discussion.

So, how are you guys going to do that? Can you elaborate on what your company's solutions are that are going to address all those needs that we just talked about?

Lorenson: I'm going to talk about specific things that Microsoft is doing that we hope will help with the issues we've heard about for SMBs. One thing we do is a lot of ease of use studies with different groups and try to understand what goes wrong when they deploy a certain application on a SAN, and we share that with our storage partners. The other thing we do is, we bring new storage technology--and one good example is Virtual Disk Service (VDS) which allows our partners to build an application on top of that to make storage provisioning much easier today than it was a year ago--so that it is almost at the level of a Windows administrator to provision storage on his storage array.

So, by sharing ease of use studies and pinpointing where the problems arise when the SAN gets deployed, we can help on the deployment front a lot, and we can also help in guiding which of these services and technologies we should add in the platform. And the other side of the equation, which we're very passionate about, is iSCSI. We think iSCSI has a lot of play in the small businesses that are moving from a direct-attached environment when they need to upgrade their hardware, and that's the trigger to move to a storage area network. Many of these companies go to iSCSI and we're enabling iSCSI with our server platform.

Marrone-Hurley: Mike, what's Intel doing to really address the needs we just discussed?

Wall: Intel views this market as a great opportunity, similar to what we realized in the server marketplace over the last 10 years. If you think about the transition in the '90s--where large mainframes were the predominant enterprise compute solution, and then the advent of standards and the high volume manufacture of microprocessors, and different operating systems--we were able to move the marketplace to a standard high-volume server model. When it first started, it was a desktop on its side, and it went to a two-processor server, and today we have 32-way and better Itanium processor-based systems that are as powerful or more powerful, with more features than any mainframe that ever existed. And we see that paradigm duplicating itself in storage moving forward.