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A store of knowledge
Friday, October 06 2000
by Emmet Cole


Storage management may not be the sexiest segment of the IT sector, but those who
are intimately involved with it are going around with a smile on their faces. 

It's because the billion-dollar business of storing, retrieving and managing
information is exploding. According to market research group Dataquest, the total
storage market is worth approximately USD35 billion today and is growing at
approximately 23 percent per year. Forecasters predict that the electronic
storage sector will be worth USD60 billion by 2003. 



The phenomenal rise of the storage management industry is driven by the
continuing surge of the Internet and our increasing reliance on electronic
information. It is estimated that on-line storage requirements increase by 200 

percent to 300 percent annually. 



Storage companies house data for e-commerce, Internet Service Providers and
Application Service Providers, organisations that generate the most Internet 

traffic and require the highest availability of all. E-commerce necessitates
storage systems strategies that can manage a large volume of data quickly,
reliably and cost-effectively. But the amount of data that has to be stored and
managed is too large and too costly for many organisations to handle themselves.




So, instead of buying, configuring and installing their own storage systems in
air-conditioned rooms with redundant power supplies and high-priced technicians,
organisations can throw a switch and let the storage management experts take
over. 



You may be impressed by one gigabyte (GB) of memory, which is equivalent to
1,073,741,824 bytes of data, but storage people prefer to talk in terms of
terabytes (TB), or 1,099,511,600,000 bytes. Put another way: your 10GB storage 

capacity will fit into a 1TB store more than one hundred times. 



Make no mistake about it: storage companies deal with data on a massive scale,
terabytes and terabytes of it. But storage management isn't only about putting
your archives into a dusty room; it's about making data accessible for
corporate intranets and e-business and ensuring round the clock availability of
mission-critical information and processes.





STORAGE ON THE NETWORK 



The latest and most exciting storage solution, offered by all the main players in
storage management, is the Storage Area Network (SAN). These are networks
specifically engineered to carry storage traffic to and from intelligent 

external disk arrays. A SAN bypasses traditional network bottlenecks and supports
direct high-speed data transfer between servers and storage devices. All of those
features mean increased storage space and, hopefully, greater 

reliability in data transfer and backup.



John Taylor, Storage Manager, Dell EMEA, told ElectricNews.Net that SAN's give
corporations the opportunity to re-gain control of their critical data and offer
improved scalability, security and performance with reduced IT management costs.
However, SANs are still in their early growth phase and require specialist
knowledge to set up and expensive software to run. Dell plans to change all this
by rolling out a series of competitively priced SAN management appliances which
will enable IT managers to easily install and manage heterogeneous SANs (ie
different storage brands accessible by different server brands all in the same
SAN).



There are many companies offering SAN solutions, but the entire storage
technology sector -including the SAN market- is dominated by EMC Corporation,
which enjoys a 30.20 percent share of the storage hardware sector and 18.2 

percent of the storage software market. EMC builds information storage
infrastructures: a combination of storage systems, software, networks and
services intended to provide fast, round-the-clock access to all of the 

information businesses and individuals need.



Nearly 80 percent of EMC's USD8 billion revenue is generated by hardware sales,
specifically Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) storage technologies. 



RAID systems allow arrays of disks to be connected to networks providing
significant improvements in system performance, reliability and scalability. They
can increase a system's storage capacity and availability by making the 

data on several disks readily available to a host computer. Sophisticated RAID
systems provide scalability by allowing customers to daisy chain multiple disks.




According to analysts, EMC's position in the market is unassailable in the
short-term. The company is expected to generate revenues of USD11 billion by
2001. But EMC has competition from some newcomers in the Network Area Storage 

(NAS) market. 



NAS devices are intelligent server storage systems that expand the storage
capacity on corporate networks. A NAS server offers an alternative to using
general-purpose, but more expensive, servers that can deal with a host of 

duties, such as handling e-mail or sending print jobs to the printer. NAS is a
booming market, with Dataquest projecting it will grow to USD2 billion by 2003.
One of EMC's newest competitors in this sector is Network Appliance. 



Based in Sunnyvale, California, Network Appliance makes special-purpose file
servers. Their systems power Yahoo's free Internet mail, calendar and Web site
hosting services. Network Appliance recently unveiled a new high-speed file 

server, which in its most basic configuration will cost about USD110,000, but
high-end systems with 12 terabytes of storage will cost just over a million
dollars. Storage management hardware doesn't come cheap.



An Irish based storage management company has been staking its own claim in the
global storage marketplace. Eurologic Systems develops storage management
solutions and software for the file server and vertical applications markets. 

The company presently employs over 320 people worldwide: approximately 250 of
them in their Dublin HQ. 



Paul Cullen, Director, Software Product Marketing and Alliances, Eurologic, told
ElectricNews.Net that the Web is driving the boom in storage, but that changes in
the corporate environment are also contributing to the sector's growth.



"In the corporate environment, enterprise-wide information access via company
intranets, as well as the rise of new e-business models is driving a
proliferation of media-intensive, server-based applications - from imaging to 

data warehousing," Cullen said. "This dramatic increase in the use of the Web,
along with the rapid deployment of media-intensive applications in the corporate
environment is driving huge demand for storage. Companies are increasing their
demand for storage by 100 percent a year."



Compaq and IBM -- both of whom have approximately a 9 percent share of the
storage hardware market -- recently formed an alliance to make their storage
offerings open and interoperable: testimony to the force of EMC. Sun 

Microsystems, Hitachi and Raidtec (which employs 35 people in its Cork plant),
are all companies competing in a market that will probably expand rapidly and
sufficiently to sustain them all for some time. But can any of them mount a 

serious challenge to EMC?



Some analysts believe that Dell Computers is the company most likely to make
significant strides in the storage sector over the next five to ten years. At the
moment Dell is ranked 15th in the hardware market, but it is expected to crack
the top ten by 2004. Dell's products include channel-based storage systems, tape
backup systems, storage management software and, of course SAN and NAS systems.
Dell's close relationship with Intel Corporation is very much to its advantage in
most markets.



According to those in the storage business, organisations that don't develop
strategies for dealing with data storage will struggle to meet information
availability demands and will be unable to provide adequate backup and recovery 

services at a competitive cost. 



However, a lack of standardisation and interoperability issues has meant that
deployment of many storage technologies continues to be limited. One of the
challenges facing storage specialists is ensuring the interoperability of their
storage systems with new generations of technologies. 



Whatever their limitations, data storage and file recovery services will become
increasingly important as more businesses and consumers rely on their PCs to
store information. 



With some industry analysts telling us that corporations will be devoting nearly
90 cents of every IT dollar -- and nearly 14 percent of their total capital
budgets -- to storage within five years, you may start to wonder why you didn't
find storage sexy years ago.



Emmet Cole is at