Continuing with my Obama theme for a bit, the beginning of 2009 offers us more political and economic limbo. Yet for the IT infrastructure industry and storage in particular, there are numerous lessons that emerged at the end of 2008 which we can apply as we sit down with our peers to figure out 2009.
Three sources in particular are worth paying attention to as we look for a common theme to emerge.
Forrester Research Caps Off 2008
With all due respect to Gartner, ESG and other popular analyst firms, Forrester analysts really stood out in December by publishing 3 separate timely reports for all of us tracking this business. These reports caught my eye as good summaries of what 2008 left us to deal with:
- Do you really need a SAN anymore?
- Forrester Cuts IT Spending Outlook ... Again
- Time To Rethink your Corporate Blogging Ideas
Let's tackle each in order.
Do you really need a SAN anymore? [NSFW]
I don't know which was funnier; the fact there is an actual website dedicated to my reaction to this report, or the predictable backlash by the dinosaurs of the SAN industry under attack. Either way you can use some of the links in this paragraph to assess how progressive your employer is when you click on them :) More importantly I can assure you all of the links in this paragraph are truly "Not Safe for Work" by both technical and business criteria as well as having the potential to offend some more delicate sensibilities!
It's easy to get lost in the weeds as you over-think the conclusions of this report, but the simple fact of the matter is that organizations of all kinds (businesses, governments, academia, etc...) look first to applications - not infrastructure, for improving corporate-wide productivity and efficient delivery of services to their customers. It's incredibly narcissistic for the storage industry to try and pretend the storage tail is wagging the application dog.
There are some key recent ISV vendor milestones which led me to draw this same conclusion earlier in the year. VMware's continued enhancement of their application virtualization storage functionality was an important indicator. Moving up the stack, Oracle's storage-centric announcements around interconnects and decision support are definitely worth watching - particularly how storage vendors resist or embrace these application-oriented moves. Yet perhaps the most impactful milestone reinforcing this trend was the publishing by Microsoft's Exchange 2007 Team of a whitepaper endorsing DAS!
Having seen Microsoft's internal information technology team (MSIT) dance with both HP SAN's and EMC SAN's in the past, I'm not surprised they ultimately concluded those respective SAN solutions were too expensive to maintain for Microsoft's own internal users. Further examination of MSIT's recent motives expose that HP & EMC SAN's are also too complex and even unreliable (see MSIT Exchange horror story disclosed at end of comment dated Sept 10).
Forrester Cuts IT Spending Outlook ... Again
While they are far from the first or last analyst firm to recognize IT budgets are under severe pressure for 2009, Forrester also points to some specific areas that will help IT lead their respective organizations back to recovery - namely energy and interest rates. The common thread here is operational efficiency since accounting rules at most organizations categorize ongoing energy and financial expenses as such.
In light of that, it's important to take a look back in history to the origins of Storage Area Networks to understand why they took off in the first place and what they'll need to do to survive in this uniquely challenging present economic environment.
Fibre-Channel SAN's emerged as a more cost-effective way to share limited and expensive resources, thereby delivering tangible new value to the organizations who invested in them. Tape Libraries were actually the original financial motivators for deploying Fibre-Channel SAN's, breaking the expensive 1:1 link between servers and backup. In this context, broader sharing saved money right away. Easy for a CFO to rubber stamp.
RAID array vendors quickly picked up on that fact and applied SAN's to even more infrastructure deployments closer to the application. Wide-striping of dozens of spindles connected via SAN or NAS provided better performance than the limited number of spindles available via server-captive DAS. This in turn helped consolidate application and file servers further saving significant capital and operational expenses. Another easy win in the boardroom.
But over a decade later as technology moved on, the technical premises behind these simple financial justifications have become invalid. Knee-jerk reactions to analyst criticism by the legacy SAN vendors is proof they are having problems remaining truly relevant when examined by the harsh reality of fundamental cost-effectiveness.
Where's the Value in non-NetApp SAN's TODAY?
It's certainly not in the interconnect, as traditional SAN vendors rush to abandon Fibre-Channel in favor of FCoE while dipping their toes in the iSCSI or NAS (CIFS/NFS) market via point solutions marketed as "Unified".
Looking at disk trends such as increased density, the value of a traditional SAN is certainly not in conventional RAID protection. All networked storage vendors (legacy, startup and everyone but NetApp in between) force their customers to compromise between the risk of RAID5 single-parity efficiency, the expense of RAID10 security and the performance overhead of newer RAID6 implementations.
What about the business value of advanced storage functionality (i.e. Thin Provisioning & Cloning, Tiered Migration, Dedupe, etc...) via sophisticated array firmware? Well, that brings us to my last point :)
Time To Rethink your Corporate Blogging Ideas
The final part of Forrester's December Trifecta includes a very revealing stack-ranking of where corporate blogging fits into the credibility hierarchy of information sources available to buyers. Not surprisingly it comes in right at the bottom (see end of page 2).
The scope of Forrester's report is clearly aimed beyond just the storage blogger community. Nevertheless it is certainly applicable to this group for 2008. While NetApp has reinforced our strong online reputation for transparency and objective credibility via the rebranding and relanch of our web site (which naturally hosts our corp bloggers like me), other vendors maintain their tired old competitive tactics online. Many of them continue to use corporate blogs as convenient launching pads for subjective FUD attacks based on non-existent evidence (think "Weapons of Mass Destruction") or outdated information taken out of current context (think "Bill Ayers").
Apart from rallying fervent employees and fanboys with this propaganda, this style of blogging does nothing to educate users and influencers of storage technology. Ultimately it degrades rather than enriches the online storage community.
A tell-tale sign of empty vendor claims regarding advanced storage functionality via new features and buzzwords is the lack of supporting evidence such as how those snazzy features scale or perform under the stress of an independently audited benchmarking workload.
Themes for 2009
As we all navigate this difficult transition period to understand what is possible for 2009 (and beyond), some important themes emerge.
Value and Efficiency uber alles. "Less is more", "Doing more with less" and other maxims will never be more directly applicable than they are NOW. Look for vendors who have a solid history and track record of selling you less (or letting you use more of what you already have) and continue to do so. Hint: When reviewing IDC rankings of vendor revenues in various storage categories, look for capacity shipped per revenue recognized. You will find NetApp at the top of that "Value Index" every time!
- Storage is not a vacuum. If Storage is your world, get out of your shell and look around the rest of your organization for opportunities to learn about how it works and what major initiatives are under way to survive this difficult downturn and thrive when the inevitable recovery comes. If your responsibility already spans more than infrastructure, look for storage solutions that are optimized for your key technology initiatives in support of overall organizational goals in 2009. Desktop & Server consolidation (incl application and file servers), storage efficiency and new paradigms for data protection (less tape and more dedupe) and networking convergence (iSCSI, NAS, FCoE, Converged Network Adapters, etc...) are emerging as the most popular initiatives for delivering improved IT efficiency to parent organizations.
- No drama, keep it cool. Apply strong analytical skills (even healthy skepticism as necessary) to all vendor proposals, especially when they attempt to directly tarnish competitors. Rely only on objective independent and verifiable evidence when making decisions, not the biased competitive claims of salespeople or rants of professional antagonists.
Nice one.
What else is in store for NetApp in 2009?
Welcome back!
Posted by: Iggy | January 10, 2009 at 02:08 PM
DAS doesn't cut it for server virtualization. What is NetApp doing with Microsoft to enhance HYPER-V deployments? SharePoint, SQL and Exchange are the apps we want to virtualize.
Posted by: TheBanker | January 10, 2009 at 06:31 PM
LOL! "Chuck-a-tool" - props to Tony A for having the guts to call it like it is - in public no less! ;->
Posted by: Roger | January 11, 2009 at 08:39 AM
In your opinion, what is the value of a NetApp SAN over DAS for Exchange, Oracle and VMware?
Posted by: Ian | January 11, 2009 at 02:08 PM
Hi Val, happy new year! It's been a while...
Great post to start the new season, hopefully more to follow.
One thing, the video doesn't seem to play from outside of the USA, so you may want to post a more accessible link instead to share this one with your international readers!
Rgds
G
Posted by: Geert | January 12, 2009 at 09:57 AM
Good evening. The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
I am from Mexico and also now am reading in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Note that the biggest bull market in history came during the steepest drop in history in the year over year rate of change of federal debt."
With love 8-), Hadi.
Posted by: Hadi | August 15, 2009 at 07:08 AM