The confusion comes from some vendor messaging and what IT storage professionals actually view as storage consolidation. This leads to miscommunication and different sets of expectations about storage optimization projects.

For IT storage professionals, storage consolidation is about storage efficiency. A new storage system can be deployed to meet the aggregate performance and capacity demands to replace disparate storage systems. The simplest form of storage consolidation is to reduce the number of boxes on the floor. But storage consolidation does not mean one storage system for all purposes.

There are legitimate reasons why IT operations end up with multiple storage systems over time. While people claim this can be avoided through better management and planning, things just don’t work out that way. Multiple storage systems come about because:

• Projects that require more storage come with a budget to purchase new storage systems specifically for that project.
• IT operations consolidate because of acquisitions or mergers.
• New capacity demands require more storage, and it often makes sense to purchase additional systems instead of expanding existing storage systems. That’s because adding capacity to existing storage reduces the access density and overall performance. Also, the asset depreciation schedule for the existing storage system may make it impractical to reset the schedule with an addition.

The “single box for everything” concept is not practical. From an economic standpoint, not all data has equal value and less valuable data can be stored on less expensive, lower-performing storage. The economics of storing data includes the cost of the storage system and the operational costs for protecting and migrating data. The data typically has a lifespan that long outlives any storage system, and managing data over its lifespan is more important for the IT storage professional than the box currently in use. And storage systems are transient. They last a maximum of four or five years before they are replaced with the latest, greatest technology.

Tiered storage can lead to consolidation and enable storage efficiency. Using solid-state technology as a performance tier is a hot trend. Tiered storage allows for greater consolidation by managing the variations in performance requirements, which is really an exploitation of the change in probability access of data over time. This allows the storage system to support a greater amount of consolidation in support of performance and capacity demands.

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There are modern architectures where the underlying device abstraction or virtualization has been changed to enable advanced features such as:

• allocating capacity only on write operations (thin provisioning)

• distribution of data across devices to maximize the number of possible I/O operations (wide striping)

• applying device protection algorithms such as RAID or Forward Error Correction at the abstracted level

• and other advanced capabilities

I wrote about some of these architectural changes here.

Other updates have changed the way storage is configured. For advanced systems, element managers are made simpler by automating underlying actions. And, the tuning that was a cross between tribal knowledge and super specialist training is built into these systems.

Another ongoing change is the elimination of electro-mechanical devices for storage. The current trend is toward NAND flash used in solid-state drives (SSDs). These devices provide less power consumption, greater performance, and potentially longer lifespans than disk technology. Currently undergoing a rapid price decline, flash and the solid-state technology to follow will become the foundation of modern storage devices.

To use an automobile analogy, storage systems have moved from a relatively primitive state to a modern system that makes it seem simple. Automobiles that used to require a crank start, manual adjustment of the spark advance, and points changes every 10,000 miles are inconceivable to most of today’s drivers. How many car owners today know what a manual choke is?

Storage systems are making that same type of modernization transition. We’re at an inflection point for storage as we move to a modern generation of systems.

I found it interesting that neither of these launches were coordinated with major storage events. This was a bit unexpected because most major storage announcements come just prior to storage events -– either industry-wide events or the vendors’ own shows — so the vendors have the opportunity to speak in depth with the assembled press, analysts and customers about their new products. In these cases, HDS and NetApp decided not to use any of the recent storage events or wait until the next storage event.

This raises the question of what would be considered a major storage event now.

VMworld, which occurs each August, is probably the biggest show for announcing new storage products from multiple vendors.  VMworld is filled with IT professionals involved with server virtualization. And these pros usually realize that storage systems can make a large difference in the number of virtual machines supported per physical server and ultimately determine the success of server virtualization.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show held this month in Las Vegas has become another storage showcase event. There were more than 20 storage product announcements at this year’s NAB. But the storage systems at NAB have different usage characteristics than traditional IT.

There are also many storage announcements at the Supercomputing conference, with the next (SC12) scheduled for November. Super computing  systems are focused on the high performance computing market.

Both NAB and SC have large numbers of attendees representing many different interest areas in their industry. NAB drew more than 100,000 attendees this year.  VMworld is increasing yearly in attendance with the focus more from traditional IT than as a specialty vertical. Years ago the major announcement venues for storage were Comdex and CeBit.

Over the next two months, Symantec, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Dell will all host their own conferences and launch products there instead of at industry-wide shows.

This means there is no longer a handful of major shows that we can look to for storage product news anymore. They can come from the remaining industry storage shows such as Storage Decisions or Storage Networking World (SNW), more targeted shows such as NAB, Supercomputing , vendor-sponsored shows, or independent of shows. You can’t stay up to speed by going to one or two shows a year anymore. Reading the coverage from SearchStorage and the other TechTarget storage sites are probably the best way to keep up with storage announcements.

Eight years ago, a friend and I were researching a book we would later call “Inescapable Data – Harnessing the Power of Convergence.” We were after an understanding of what kinds of new information one could produce by blending data of different types and from different sources — GPS data, combined with RFID, combined with data from a shipping manifest could be used to track shipments in real time for example.

In the process of doing our research, we interviewed many CEOs, CIOs, and others in leadership positions to see if they were aware of the new variety of data types from wired and wireless sources. Furthermore we wanted to know if they had any plans to use them to pursue new business opportunities or create new ways to enhance their working environments.

To our surprise, we found many executives who not only were aware of the new data richness available to them, but also had plans to exploit new data sources.

The CEO of a major metropolitan hospital was working with members of his IT staff to build a system that combined RFID with hospital patient data. Drug carts equipped with RFID sensors would be used to deliver drugs to hospital patients. Each cart would “know” which drugs it was carrying because each pill container would have an RFID tag on it identifying the specific drug. If the cart entered a room where a patient would have an adverse reaction if given the drug by mistake, an alarm would sound alerting a nearby nursing station that a danger existed. This type of monitoring has become standard practice today, but it was just a concept eight years ago.

In 2004, we found other examples in business, government, agriculture, and entertainment. However, we also found that, while there was demand to combine data sources to leverage a new multiplicity of data sources, systems were not yet ready and available to deliver on their visions.

If we were writing the book now, we’d be calling it “Big Data” and we’d be able to describe the many types of systems now available to turn these visions into reality. That’s the first reason why I believe big data is here to stay. The demand among business, government, health care, entertainment, and scientific leaders has been building for years, and they can now turn to IT and say “make it so.”

However, there is a second and perhaps more compelling reason: The analytics systems now being built to extract meaning from once unimaginable amounts of data — sometimes delivering new insights in real time — are moving toward imitating the way the human mind functions. They can sense. They can process multiple inputs simultaneously. They can focus on only the data that’s relevant to a given situation.

Furthermore, they can be taught to continually ask new questions. It is a hallmark of human thinking to use a conclusion from one line of thinking as a starting point for another. We continually ask “Why?” We often search for a deeper understanding. The analytics systems now appearing can be given the same “desire” to explore, to use one end state as the beginning of another line of processing and analysis.

There is a tendency to see the big-data phenomenon as another turn of the hype cycle. Indeed, I’ve been told that a prominent marketing executive was overheard as saying, “Never has a term so vague meant so much to so many.” Not long from now, big data will go the way of all technology hype cycles and become another chapter in computing history, following the ones on cloud, client/server, and the mainframe. But it will have spawned new computing systems — ones that more closely think the way we do.

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Understanding why Storage people are conservative is necessary in order to effectively communicate to their needs especially around new technologies.  So here is our short list of reasons from our experience with IT (if you have others, would love to hear from you   camberley@evaluatorgroup.com )

1. The first rule of storage is LOSE NO DATA  – It is one thing to lose availability, it is another to lose the data.  It is why there are so many copies, so many ways to recover, so much testing, testing, testing before deployment.  Once it is gone – it’s gone.  A hard example of this the forest fire in Colorado last month where  23 houses burnt to the ground and 200+ families  were evacuated.  The evacuees got to go back home, granted to damage.  The lost houses, are just that – lost.
2. Storage is EXTREMELY COMPLEX –  We have cool new GUI’s, iPad access and integrated management.  This does nothing to reduce the requirement for integration and interface testing.  In fact, if anything, the masking and creation of ease of use increases the need for regression and failure testing.  Just a glance at all the various layers in the storage architecture gives you an idea of what a vendor must scrutinize to deliver a 4 –nines or more product.  It is no wonder the introduction of SSD, Thin Provisioning or Tiering brings conservative responses by the IT admin.
3. Useful life, warranty and depreciation schedules. – Storage usually starts as a tier 1 device, once it is reached the end of warranty or depreciation, its next phase is tier two or support of less critical applications.  For this reason, storage has a useful life of 5 years.  More on this topic can be found in Randy Kern’s StorageSoup Blog.
4. Knowledge and familiarity –One of my favorite stories about the value of familiarity was a call we had on a 10 year old architecture.  The client was refreshing their technology and we were assisting on the RFP. Our first response was – why would anyone just refresh the technology, when there are some new, incredible technologies available that can impact the overall cost of ownership? After review of the environment, offerings and requirements, the answer was  – experience and skills with in the data center.  With all the changes occurring in the company, and the experience of the IT storage team, change and re-education was not in the best interest of the company – if the appropriate terms could be negotiated.   We have seen this repeated in other companies often in the name of expediency.

Given all this, how does new technology get introduced and adopted?  The easiest way is through new applications and initiatives.   Often initiatives need a new way of approaching the business requirements and thus introduce a different architecture to deliver performance or capacity efficiency.  Next blog – applications driving new architectures.

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The target audience is different in the media and entertainment space than in general IT. The backgrounds of the people looking to store media content are different from those in traditional IT and their needs are also different. Their titles do not translate directly to mainstream IT, and they use unique terminology that requires knowledge of their business to really understand.

This poses a challenge for storage vendors. To meet their needs, the vendors must understand these differences and speak their customers’ languages.

They need to understand that the applications that store and retrieve information are also different. The workflow in media and entertainment dictate the type of applications that will be used at various times during production and delivery. Another critical consideration is the need for data interchange. This role is still handled by removable media in many cases.

The media and entertainment market requires large amounts of data that is growing exponentially, driven by improved camera resolution driving higher capacity being produced. Special purpose systems are used to modify (edit) data and multiple operations and people are used in the workflows. Data requirements change during the workflow process. Storage systems must support high performance for post-production, large numbers of streams for broadcast, and high integrity with large capacity for archiving.

Characteristics such as point-in-time copies that are crucial in traditional IT have only nominal value in media and entertainment. Vendors need to promote the right set of features to reach these companies. Without the correct focus, opportunities are missed and the vendor demonstrates a lack of understanding of the customer needs.