Over there: revisiting the mid-range storage market in Europe - Business of Technology - Buyers Guide

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2002 by Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Storage in the enterprise is no longer just about adding peripherals and capacity as the network grows. Storage infrastructure, its integration into the greater IT environment, efficient management of corporate data, as well as the infrastructure itself, has become a strategic part of IT's charter. Managers are looking for better, more efficient ways to manage and protect the assets they have. They are struggling with new data types that have different performance and management requirements than traditional data, and they are looking for ways to efficiently protect enterprise data assets in real-time.

What has come as a revelation to some is that these needs are driving not only the high end of the market, but the mid-range as well. The way Sageza sees it, this trend will continue to accelerate as information continues to multiply. In addition to the expansion of basic capacity, mid-tier customers have to grapple with management effectiveness increasing in importance as they seek to multiply the amount of storage resources an individual administrator can manage.

As technologies move to this environment, they must become easier to use and more standardized, since they are implemented by more generalists and fewer specialists. What appeals to the mid-market are solutions that involve straightforward deployment, provide investment protection, and are simple to use. This portends the development of a new generation of products that package capabilities in a smaller footprint at more attractive prices. Customers are deploying networked storage infrastructures and consolidating their storage in the data center in order to gain cost efficiencies and business agility. As they achieve these benefits in the data center, they are looking to drive this approach further out into their organizations. These expanded environments require storage solutions that offer a whole new price/performance curve, while still delivering a growing subset of capabilities currently found at the enterprise level.

This article looks at the business needs driving buying behavior in the mid-market, evaluates what the major storage vendors are doing to address those evolving needs. For the purposes of this article, Sageza defines the mid-range market to include departments within larger enterprises (generally ranging from 50 to 1,000 employees) as well as small-to medium-sized enterprises.

Tracking growth and change in mid-market IT departments is a bit like watching the development of the European Union over the last decade. The decision to create the EU was founded on the belief that countries working together could be more efficient and effective, and have a stronger whole if they centralized some processes while better managing localized functions. if managers of mid-tier environments are struggling with similar sorts of issues.

Most of the storage in organizations today has existed for years, perpetuating outdated assumptions about storage consumption; but these assumptions were based upon the technology infrastructure and business challenges of the past. if managers, like their EU counterparts, have come to realize that in order to become more effective and cost efficient, they need to modify their mid-tier storage infrastructure by networking the storage, centralizing the management of homogeneous and heterogeneous environments, and leveraging the enhanced scalability and price/performance of new technology.

Business and Technology Together Drive the Market

Factors leading customers to the next generation of midrange storage products can be broadly classified into two types. The first and perhaps most important is in the business arena, being systemic issues driving change across the IT infrastructure. The second set of factors is technology issues. As the rest of the IT infrastructure, such as applications and servers, evolves, complementary changes in the storage architecture are also likely to occur.

In this section we look at three business and three technology issues that we believe are affecting storage customer expectations.

Business

One business issue driving the market is environmental sophistication. Customers leading the call for advanced products usually have highly complex environments. Complexity is usually thought to be a function of the size of the environment or installation, but the relative size is less important than the tasks it is required to complete. In the past, a smaller-scale solution generally meant one denuded of features or that did not offer the same degree of performance in comparison to the high end. Now it means a solution that is the right size for the environment, frequently with many of the same features as its high-end cousins. Vendors are challenged to create families of flexible products that scale up or down as customers require.

A second key business need is manageability, which is important in all environments. For large enterprises or departments, the number and variety of products that must be managed together in a coherent structure is often the primary problem. In smaller enterprises it is usually the breadth and depth of the if department that is the essential issue. Even if an if organization has a somewhat homogeneous environment, it needs products that do not require a team of people to manage them around the clock. In addition, customers frequently face a balance between manageability, and scalability or flexibility. IT managers are becoming increasingly unwilling to treat these characteristics as optional, and are looking for products that provide added value through manageability of scale and adaptability to a changing business environment.