End users say few technologies measure up to their increasingly
complex environments. Some are concerned that the slowdown in IT
spending will affect the development of future storage
technologies.
Marvin Walling, an engineer at Lockheed Martin, said the job of
managing several terabytes of data has become a complex
configuration of storage boxes. What the industry needs now is
"out-of-the-box integration", he said.
"We want seamless data storage. We want reliable backup, and
recovery and cost reductions. We want more for less," said Walling.
Getting more for less was a common theme at the Storage Networking
World conference in Orlando this week. IT managers said cost
cutting has forced them to view projects from a
total-cost-of-ownership and return-on-investment approach. Most are
turning to software developers to help address those issues.
Alex Gurvich, assistant vice-president of GE Equity's technology
group, said the slowdown in IT spending could delay efforts to
produce new technology.
"You need interoperability and storage management simplicity," said
Walling, adding that storage grows by 100% a year. "The budgets are
seeing single-digit growth or are flat, and you are being asked to
do more with less."
Enterprise Storage Group analyst Steve Duplessie said most storage
vendors do not consider how their products can affect a large
company's IT infrastructure.
Kurt Bahrs, disaster recovery specialist at Aetna, wants a tool
that can monitor his data end-to-end, and do backup and recovery,
whether it is on a global storage area network (SAN) or a local
area network (LAN).
"I want to get away from NT and midrange storage boxes," said
Bahrs. "I want to put everything on a unified storage, to save on
my footprint space and cut down on recovery time."
Another problem is that there are too many storage vendors with
proprietary solutions that will not tie into existing systems,
Bahrs said.
Several chief executives at top technology vendors were critical of
their own industry, questioning the production of new products at a
break-neck pace without first determining the needs of IT managers.
"We hardly know anything about fibre channel, and yet we're
lurching forward into IP storage, Infiniband and my favourite,
virtualisation," said Peter van Oppen, chairman and chief executive
of Advanced Digital Information. "The customer is in a chaotic,
messy and sloppy environment."
StorageTek chief executive Patrick Martin said a lack of standards
and planning has led to confusion in the industry. "Users don't
leave it up to vendors to develop those standards," he told
delegates.
There are two things that chief information officers can be sure
of, said Martin. One company cannot provide all the solutions, and
technology that integrates islands of computing makes things more
complex.
Greg Reyes, chief executive of fibre channel switch vendor Brocade,
said vendors should explain technology and its benefits in plain
English, and "get beyond the technical jargon".