Storage growth, and managing it, are among the themes of this
year's Storage Decisions conference in New York. In user led
sessions, as well as conversations at the show, storage managers
have said that consolidating their storage environment is a top
priority -- and that for them, the competitive pricing they might
get playing two vendors against one another, or the flashy features
offered by some startups, don't outweigh the management headaches
of a heterogeneous shop.
Tim Hesson, corporate manager, storage management for Kindred
Healthcare, said in his presentation on storage area network (SAN)
consolidation, that one of the major factors prompting a massive,
seven-month consolidation project for his storage fabric was a
desire to standardise his environment on products from Cisco
Systems Inc.
Kindred, an acute care hospital and rehabilitation center
consortium with approximately 200 terabytes (TB) of storage, is a
big Cisco shop for Ethernet switches but had been using a
"core-edge design" from McData as its SAN fabric.
Hesson said he undertook the consolidation project because his 26
McData switches, with 100 interswitch links (ISLs), were an
overwhelming management headache. But, he said, the move away from
McData had more to do with standardising the IT environment than a
problem with its products.
Standards in several areas were something Hesson emphasised
throughout his talk. His shop is also using the Information Systems
Audit and Control Association's (ISACA) Control Objectives for
Information and related Technology (COBIT) to standardise its
processes and set standards for everything from redundancy -- dual
host bus adapters (HBA) for everything is the rule, he said -- to
organisational roles.
"It sounds trivial," Hesson said, "but halfway through your
project with cables lying everywhere is not a time to figure out
who's going to do what tomorrow, who's going to work on this
problem, and who's going to answer the phone."
Simplifying with one vendor -- despite the risks
Other users at the show said that while they knew they might
lose out on competitive pricing -- or even on superior technology
-- sticking with one vendor can be a matter of survival.
In a way, said John B. DeRosa, manager, network systems for the
wiring device division of electronics manufacturer Hubbell Inc.,
having a single vendor for an entire environment can be its own
single point of failure. "You're tied into their technology," he
said. "And you have to grow with them. It makes it difficult for
new players to compete -- but that's the risk you run."
It has only been recently, DeRosa said, that his shop has been
heavily standardising on EMC Corp. storage. Previously, his
division had an EMC Clariion CX600 at the central data center in
Milford, Conn., and various
direct attached storage (DAS) and network
attached storage (NAS) devices in six branch locations.
More recently, however, DeRosa said his division is in the
process of installing EMC AX150 arrays in the branch offices and
centralising backup. The standardisation on one system is not
limited to primary storage either, DeRosa said. The company's SAP
systems are also being standardised across the board; backups,
meanwhile, have all been standardised on Veritas' NetBackup. EMC's
partner, Dell Inc., dominates the server side.
Nor is the traditional "one throat to choke" the sole deciding
factor in the standardisation on EMC, DeRosa said. Another key
factor for him is a large number of fellow customers to rely on for
advice in solving problems.
Steve Palmucci, senior director, IT infrastructure and
operations for Teva North America, a pharmaceutical company, has
two vendors in his shop -- IBM and Network Appliance, Inc.
(NetApp). IBM's DS8100 arrays run his primary storage for critical
databases, using high-end Fibre Channel (FC) drives; NetApp's
FAS980 and 960 filers occupy the rest in his Tier-2 storage.
But while there's more than one vendor in his shop, there could
have been many more than two -- Palmucci is in the process of
consolidating primarily Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) DAS onto NetApp's
filers with SAN/NAS capabilities, for which he might have used
separate vendors, or created separate tiers, instead.
"It is not our strategy to have multiple vendors within tiers,"
Palmucci said, adding that he chose to standardise Tier-2 on NetApp
because it offered access to NFS, CIFS and FC interfaces. While
Palmucci said he knew vendor lock-in could theoretically drive his
costs up, "there's a cost just to buy into a technology. Buying
into frames and licensing multiple times on any tier just doesn't
make sense."
 | | | | | Why would you try to save money
on hardware by playing two vendors against each other when you add
so much complexity it negates the savings anyway?"
Stephen
Foskett, |
| | | | | |
| |
|
Leo Frisino, storage and network specialist for the state of New
York Executive Department Division of Housing and Community
Renewal, said his company had also taken the NetApp hybrid-system
route several years ago, condensing three Compaq/HP SANs onto three
NetApp3020 units and two FAS270 clusters, spread over four sites,
but all administered through one interface from the department's
headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
The risks of being reliant on one vendor "do enter my mind,"
Frisino said, "but so far there have been no issues." In fact,
Frisino said, he thinks he's getting better support from NetApp
because he's making a bigger investment. "We're dealing directly
with them, rather than with a reseller," he said.
During his presentation, Hesson also said he was relieved, in
retrospect, that he had decided to standardise on Cisco from a
support perspective after eight supervisor cards -- the main
management blade in the MDS director -- were overloaded during the
process of consolidating his fabric.
After the first was overloaded, Hesson said, Cisco was proactive
in replacing not only the first, but all of the cards in his
environment. That's the difference in having a vendor heavily
involved in a project, rather than being one of many players, he
said.
In larger environments, according to Stephen Foskett, director
of strategy services for Glasshouse Technologies Inc., the cost of
hardware is often the smallest portion of a company's total spend.
In one large shop for which Foskett consults, he said hardware
accounted for just 14% of the
total cost of ownership (TCO).
"Why would you try to save money on hardware by playing two
vendors against each other when you add so much complexity it
negates the savings anyway?" he said.
In larger shops, Foskett said, the way to keep competitive
pressure on vendors is to bring another vendor in for Tier-2, or to
conduct aggressive
request for proposals (RFP) every three
years. "Make sure vendors know that in three years, there'll be
another competitive RFP," he said.
If being beholden to one vendor still sticks in a user's craw,
management can be simplified by consolidating with one management
tool instead, according to Greg Schulz, founder and analyst with
the StorageIO Group -- something that's becoming more and more
viable as vendors work toward
storage resource management (SRM) standards,
such as
SMI-S.
"It all depends on your philosophies and objectives," Schulz
said. "Some people argue that standardising on just one vendor for
the sake of simplicity is just one step away from outsourcing."