Spending on storage is soaring. But a major new study suggests that
many firms don't understand what they are buying. Karl Schneider
reports
A memorable sketch from the hit 1980s satirical TV programme Not
the Nine O'Clock News featured a technically naive customer trying
to buy a hi-fi system in a specialist shop. The sadistic shop
assistant took great delight in ridiculing the customer's ignorance
of hi-fi jargon, bamboozling him with talk of woofers, tweeters,
Dolby and direct-drive turntables.
A new study, one of the biggest of its kind ever conducted in the
UK, suggests that hard-pressed senior IT professionals in UK firms
may be in a similar position to that hi-fi customer when it comes
to buying modern storage systems.
While demand for storage capacity continues to grow at double-digit
rates in most UK firms, the study, conducted among more than 600
senior IT professionals by Computer Weekly and specialist storage
consultancy Posetiv, paints a picture of an IT community that is
struggling to understand the expanding jungle of jargon thrown up
by the latest storage architectures and protocols.
The IT professionals questioned say they are struggling to manage
their storage infrastructures, worried by lack of standards,
confused by storage technology choices and suffering from a lack of
access to people with the right skills.
Despite the current uncertain economic climate, the recent storage
spending boom shows no sign of abating, according to the study,
which was conducted after the 11 September terrorist attacks on the
US. UK firms expect to spend 15% more on storage next year on
average than they did this year.
And it is the organisations that are already spending the biggest
slice of their budgets on storage which are expecting to increase
spending on storage the most next year. On average, respondents
said their firms spend about 12% of their IT budget on storage. The
smaller spenders, those spending less than 10% of their IT budget
on storage, expect to increase spending on storage by 10% in 2002.
But the quarter of firms who already spend 11%-20% of their IT
budgets on storage expect their storage spending to leap by 16%.
And the 10% of firms in which storage accounts for more than 20% of
their IT budgets say their storage bills will shoot up by 27% next
year.
When asked what is driving this growing demand for storage
capacity, respondents say it is both existing applications soaking
up more megabytes and new applications creating new demand. In
smaller firms, existing applications are slightly more significant
in driving storage demand, while new applications are having a
marginally bigger impact in larger firms.
The biggest culprit is e-mail, singled out by almost two-thirds of
respondents as one of the applications most responsible for pushing
storage capacity to the limit. That will come as no surprise, given
the importance of e-mail to most businesses today. A separate study
conducted by Computer Weekly earlier this year found that most
organisations now see e-mail as something that the business depends
on to operate effectively. As more and more business processes rely
on e-mail, the result is a growing mountain of documents that have
to be stored, often for legal reasons.
"With about 80% of the people we talk to about storage, messaging
is the first thing they raise," says Graeme Rowe, marketing
director at Posetiv.
The research suggests that general office applications, such as
word processing and presentation packages, are the second biggest
data dumpers, followed by Internet-related applications other than
e-mail. The latter is particularly significant in the public
sector, as central and local government struggle to meet government
targets for boosting the proportion of services available online.
For all of these applications, their ability to swamp existing
storage systems is heightened by the growing use of
megabyte-munching data types, such as images and video.
Not surprisingly, this accelerating demand for storage capacity is
causing headaches for IT managers.
Top of the list of storage-related concerns is the problem of
managing storage capacity, cited by 70% of the IT professionals
surveyed.
"Seventy per cent is astronomical", remarks Rowe. But he expects
storage management to feature strongly in the list of user
headaches. "If you talk to all the vendors their market offerings
are concentrating more and more around management tools," he notes.
The cost of buying storage and the cost of managing it comes joint
second in the league table of users' storage concerns.
Graham Titterington, storage specialist at analyst Ovum, says this
betrays a lack of understanding among storage users. "The message
that management costs far outweigh hardware cost hasn't got through
yet. Managing storage is seen as difficult, but not necessarily
expensive. It seems that IT staff are not separating out the time
they spend on storage."
Confusion over technology is cited by almost one in five IT
professionals. In the largest firms, those with more than 1,500
staff, the proportion who say confusion over technology is a major
concern rises to one in four.
"I blame the suppliers," says Rowe. "I don't think they give
effective advice. It's like selling pensions - you can sell
anything you want because people don't understand what they are
buying. I think in a lot of cases it's the same with
storage."
The lack of understanding of storage technology is highlighted when
IT professionals are asked how well they understand the technical
jargon used by storage suppliers.
Almost a third of those questioned say they do not know what a
storage area network (San) is - and nearly half of those say they
have not even heard of the term. The proportion who express
ignorance is even higher for network-attached storage (NAS),
direct-attached file system (DAFS), storage wide area network
(Swan) and network data management protocol (NDMP) - in the latter
two cases only about a quarter of senior IT professionals say they
have any understanding of the terms, and half say they have never
heard of them.
Interestingly, 45% of respondents say they have no understanding of
direct-attached storage (DAS), even though this simply means the
traditional storage architecture in which storage capacity is
directly associated with the server running an application.
The study suggests that many IT professionals see their lack of
understanding of storage technologies as a problem. Less than one
in five agree strongly that they understand these technologies well
enough to do their job, although a further 42% agree slightly.
Perhaps related to their confusion over technology, the vast
majority of organisations say they have no access to specific
storage expertise, either in-house or externally.
More than three-quarters of firms depend on general in-house IT
expertise when making storage decisions. One firm in six relies on
the expertise of a general IT outsourcer or consultant. Less than
one in five have an in-house storage expert, and even among the
very largest firms this figure only rises to just under one in
four. Only one organisation in 20 makes use of an outside storage
specialist.
One respondent in six say a lack of skilled people is one of the
biggest storage-related concerns in their organisation. And almost
a quarter agree either strongly or slightly that their organisation
suffers because it does not have access to adequate storage
expertise.
A significant number of those questioned say they are concerned
about the lack of effective technical standards for storage
systems. Nearly half agree, to some extent, that a lack of
widely-used technical standards in storage products is a
significant problem.
Rowe says the lack of technical standards is a growing concern
among storage users, driven by the growing significance of storage
in IT systems. "Two or three years ago people didn't give a damn
about lack of standards because storage wasn't that important," he
says.
Given the lack of understanding of the latest storage technologies,
it's not surprising that the take-up of San and NAS architectures
is relatively low. Only 8% of respondents say Sans are widely used
in their organisations, and less than a quarter say they are making
any use of this type of storage architecture. The figures for NAS
are slightly higher - 10% and 31% respectively.
"The level of NAS and San take-up is worryingly low," Rowe remarks.
"More people should at least consider using them in future."
Rowe says that although the initial cost could be high, the latest
storage architectures justify themselves through improved back-up
and restore, better data accessibility and by helping firms to
avoid losing control of storage added piecemeal around the
business.
"They could be preparing a storage management nightmare for the
future," he warns.
The preponderance of NAS over San does not surprise Rowe. "We're
installing a lot more NAS than San," he says. "This comes back to
what people are advised - if they can get away with a NAS, they
should. It's cheaper to buy, less complex and easier to manage."
San usage is lowest among manufacturing firms. As you would expect,
bigger firms are much more likely to have implemented a San than
smaller ones. NAS usage is particularly high in the public sector.
When asked at what stage in the development of a new IT system they
consider storage options, just under half say at the initial
scoping and requirements specification stage.
"That's much better than I expected," comments Rowe. "Eighteen
months ago, most were considering storage at the system design
stage, or even during implementation - they would just go out and
get it as an off-the-shelf product."
Rowe says many firms have had their fingers burnt buying storage as
an afterthought, ending up with escalating costs and storage
management headaches. Perhaps this explains the larger than
expected number who now say they consider storage up-front.
Whatever the reason, only 7% say they now leave storage
considerations until system implementation, and only 6% say storage
gets thought about after the rest of the system is in place.
However, most firms say they still do not measure the return on
investment for storage spending, either separately or as part of
the overall spending on a system.
"This is probably not surprising, since most people regard storage
and IT as a must-have and the issue is which option is most cost
effective - not shall we have it at all," says Titterington.
Rowe says most firms could not measure return on investment for
storage effectively, because most firms do not have an effective
measure of the overall cost of storage. He says this is because
most firms do not have effective management tools. But he expects
this to change in future. "As storage management tools become more
complex, IT departments can charge back to business units based on
the amount of storage they use," he points out. "That will become
more common as storage service providers start to kick in. And it
will be much easier to see how much is spent on storage."
In summary Rowe says, "People understand there's a real need for
storage in the future - a higher need than for other areas of IT in
the organisation. But there's a worrying trend in the lack of
skills and understanding - they don't know what is right for them
to put in place."
Rowe believes storage suppliers shoulder at least some of the blame
for this. "Has industry been deliberately not informing users of
how to make the best use of storage and the value of having open
standards? Vendors probably want to lock users into proprietary
technology."
The background to the survey
Computer Weekly and
Posetiv, the UK's biggest independent storage consultancy,
questioned a sample of senior IT professionals via e-mail during
the week commencing 22 October. The sample was split across all
main industry sectors, and covered large, medium and small size
firms. The survey was completed by 613 respondents. The results
were analysed by independent research company NSM Research.
Talking storage jargon
The study found that there was a
widespread lack of understanding of the following storage
technology jargon. How many could you explain?
- San (storage area network) - high-speed networking architecture
based on centralised storage that interconnects servers and data
stores at gigabit speeds via a dedicated Fibre Channel connection.
It provides a single point of storage accessed by multiple
servers
- NAS (network-attached storage) - a NAS device is a dedicated
storage server that allows more disc storage capacity to be added
to an ordinary local area network at a relatively low cost.
- DAFS (direct-attached file system) - a protocol that lets a
program send information directly to a network system without
relying on a computer's operating system to manage the
communication. DAFS will let software talk directly to data files
stored in peripheral devices
- Swan (storage wide area network) - a San distributed across two
or more geographically-separate sites - the storage equivalent of a
Wan
- NDMP (network data management protocol) - open standard
protocol that defines a common architecture for the way different
file servers on a network are backed up. It allows the central
back-up application to back up different file servers running
different platforms and versions.
Spotlight on storage area networks
The study focused on
firms that had implemented a storage area network (San), looking at
the factors which had driven them to invest in the technology and
the problems they encountered. Most of the 139 organisations that
had built a San say their main objectives were to improve the
manageability and accessibility of corporate data. Almost half say
they wanted to reduce the cost of ownership of storage systems, and
29% say a key objective was to reduce back-up and restore times.
Larger firms are more likely than smaller ones to cite reducing
cost of ownership as a reason for investing in Sans.
Lack of skilled people emerges as the most widespread problem firms
encounter when implementing a San. Almost half of all 139
organisations with Sans say they were affected by this. The biggest
firms are most likely to suffer from a lack of skilled people. Not
surprisingly, more than a third mention the initial cost as a
problem. But 30% complain of the lack of interoperability between
products, and a quarter cite lack of software integration as a
significant problem. "People recognise that they can't link their
IBM box with their EMC box with their HDS box," says Rowe.
He says this problem will not go away in the short term, "Among the
hardware vendors, you'll get little groups working together. But we
won't see true virtualisation for a number of years."
Rowe warns that firms planning to implement a San need to think
carefully about how to manage it. "We're hearing stories of people
who have implemented Sans, then turned them off and gone back to
their original storage architecture," he says. "It all comes down
to having the right management tools in place. Unless you have
effective management tools it's a nightmare to manage."