Extreme Storage: SAN Pushes the Limits of the Enterprise - Industry Trend or Event

ENT, May 24, 2000 by Joseph McKendrick

In the crazy ups and downs of the IT world, there was always one steady and predictable element you could count on: storage. From year to year, databases and systems would grow at a steady pace. IT managers simply added disk space on the fly as applications grew or were brought online, and they based storage budgets on system development plans for the coming year. No longer.

Now, storage requirements are growing as wildly as everything else. E-commerce, business intelligence, data warehousing, e-mail, and Windows 2000 have blown the whole storage scenario to pieces. In a survey by FIND/SVP on behalf of EMC Corp. (www.emc.com), 74 percent of managers say they are being asked to roll out new applications at record speed, with 85 percent saying their biggest challenge is responding quickly to unpredictable customer demand generated by the Internet.

"A lot of the increase is being driven by these messaging systems, such as Exchange and Lotus Notes," says Brian Maher, senior program manager at EMC. "These applications tend to gobble up quite a bit of capacity as we get more ornate with our PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets."

Companies are absorbing and collecting an enormous amount of information, says Robert Abraham, president of Freeman Reports (www.freemanreports.com), a storage industry analyst firm. "Every time a customer or employee makes a transaction or inquiry, the company needs to record that. Plus, there's all their databases and other internal requirements," he says.

This is all wreaking havoc with storage planning.

Haphazard The spontaneous combustion of storage needs is expensive. Dataquest Inc. (www.dataquest.com) estimates that storage represents 35 percent of hardware purchases. IT departments continue to increase annual budgets for storage hardware and services by an average of 16 percent to 20 percent per year. On average, storage requirements are doubling every year. Among Internet companies, demand for storage capacity is doubling every 90 days. Companies can't seem to get enough in storage capacity, serving a range of needs from performance to fault tolerance and backup. Even for the storage industry, whose members are used to high growth numbers, this is unprecedented.

"In 1993, the total worldwide requirement for mainframes was 75 TB," EMC's Maher says. "Today, we're seeing many datacenters going well over 100 TB."

"How do you back up 100 TB?" asks Wayne Giroux, manager of storage strategy at Amdahl Corp. (www.amdahl.com). Rapid growth in storage has made both disk and tape storage a daunting challenge. "How do you back up when you have to have your applications online and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year?"

That's why storage capacity planning has grown so important in recent years. Organizations need to develop a roadmap of how much disk space they will require as they expand applications and e-commerce efforts, and the financial justifications for such expansion.

"CIOs who carefully monitor transaction performance and associated storage utilization requirements should be better prepared to meet ever-changing needs," says Edward Broderick, senior research analyst at Robert Frances Group Inc. (www. rfgonline.com). "CIOs should judge whether growth over the next two to five years could be economically accommodated with more devices of the current technologies or whether conversion to a new technology is warranted."

Chiron Corp. (www.chiron.com), a biotechnology company, recently reigned in its disk acquisition process with a deliberate, planned methodology and software tools. "Managing disk space was pretty much hit or miss," says Anthony Flux, director of IS at Chiron.

Chiron's IT department didn't know precisely who was using exactly how much disk space. They couldn't get down to that level. Also, the administrators managed on a requirement basis: If a partition filled up, or got too close to the limit, they sent out e-mail messages and dealt with it using manual processes.

"It was inefficient, it took a lot of time, and it was not very effective," he says.

More Than flat-com In the wild world of e-commerce, it's hard to plan for next week, let alone six months down the road. "No one has any idea how fast it's going to grow," Amdahl's Giroux says. "How do you plan for capacity when you don't know how successful you're going to be?" An initial investment in a few terabytes worth of storage "could very quickly grow to the hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes," he explains.

This isn't just a dot-coin problem, either. Traditional in-house business applications in both Internet and brick-and-mortar companies gobble up plenty of storage. "Even traditional applications are getting an e-commerce slant to them now," says Duane Ternes, manager of Unix and database systems at Electric Lightwave Inc. (www.eli.net), a network service provider. For example, Electric Lightwave is now exploring providing billing details to customers, which means leveraging data from back-end systems. "Applications such as this create direct impacts to our storage environments," Ternes says.