The Future of Storage in the Data Center

1
The Future of Storage in the Data Center

• Richard Scannell
• VP Corporate Dev Strategy
• GlassHouse Technologies

2
Agenda

• Shifting Expectations
• Technology Vendors
• People Process
• Cost

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Audience ResponsePlease profile yourself
Hosted by

• 1. IT End User no privileged access, follows IT
  policy
• 2. IT Administrator privileged access, enforces
  IT policy
• 3. IT Manager grants privileged access, defines
  IT policy
• 4. IT Executive generally privileged, ignores
  IT policy

0 / 499
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Ever Changing Requirements
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Shifting Expectations

• End-User - The Storage Utility
• Endless Supply
• Increasing Quality
• Commodity Pricing
• Changing Business Demands
• Information drives competitive advantage
• Regulatory demands drive up risk

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The Storage Utility

• Complex intersection of
• Defined Service Levels, supported by
• Standardized Technology sets, managed under
• Mature Processes, all governed by
• A Predictable Cost Model
• (Sound like a mainframe.?)

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Shifting Business Demands

• Faith Based Initiatives (Innocent till proven
  guilty)
• 5-Nines, 6-Nines
• Business Continuity
• Disaster Recovery
• Millions spent, questionable results
• Evidence Based Regulations (Guilty till
  demonstrated innocent)
• Sarbanes-Oxley
• Patriot Act
• HIPAA
• 21 CFR Part11
• Billions to be lost, unquestionable results

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Technology Directions
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Technology - Currently Typical

• Highly Heterogeneous Environments
• DAS, NAS, FC SAN
• Disk for Primary Storage
• Tape for Secondary Storage
• Poor management tools
• Low utilization

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Technology - On The Horizon

• SAN/NAS convergence
• iSCSI IP based SANs (think, the end of DAS)
• Disk based (or accelerated) backup (dont think,
  the end of tape)
• Archiving immature technology (WORM, CAS, DBs)
  look for service providers here
• Heterogeneous replication
• Storage Security
• Real mid market solutions

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Venture/Vendor Activity

• Still Significant Investment
• Continued first rounds deals
• Lots of follow-on deals
• Consolidation has already begun
• Trellisoft
• Pirus
• Astrum
• Casualties not withstanding
• TrueSAN
• BMC Patrol Storage Manager

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Emerging ones to watch

• i-SCSI
• EqualLogic, Intransa, Lefthand Networks
• Management Tools
• AppIQ, Creekpath, InterSAN, Softek, Storability
• Replication/Migration
• FalconStor, Softek, Topio
• Others
• Diligent, FilesX, Inflection Systems, Invio,
  Revivio

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Organizational Issues
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A Core Competency Issue

• Borrow an example from the retail world
• Put a box on a half-empty truck traveling to
  another city effective cost (to shipper) is
  free
• Put that box in a warehouse for a year, keep it
  safe, at an appropriate temperature, with fire
  suppression systems etc. that costs money every
  single day
• Retail understands the fundamental difference
  between shipping and warehousing and staff them
  accordingly.
• Storage has a persistent cost model unlike
  anything IT has managed before (think
  warehousing)
• IT must develop competency in managing
  commodities with persistent cost models

15
People and Process Changes

• New roles and responsibilities are needed
• Defined Storage Group
• Business Storage Analyst
• Regulatory Audit team
• Tighter change control
• New metrics

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Technology At Odds With Organizational Structures

• Typical Scenario
• The Operators get all requests for data
  restores
• The operators were trained on how to do recovery
  from the tape backup application
• Even though there have been huge investments in
  snapshots and replication technology, requests
  for restores go to the Operations team and they
  starting looking for tapes

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Financial Focus
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Cost Accounting

• TCO Real versus marketing
• Benchmarking may be difficult if not moot
• Policy drives costs multiple copies, retention
  timeframes
• Information on the Balance Sheet?

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Align Cost with Value

• Occupancy
• Appropriately congregate data by value and
  rationalize storage requirements at each phase
• Architecture
• Hardware/Software requirements
• Processes and Standards
• Governance
• Validation and qualification
• Movement of data up or down the value chain

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Financing shifts

• Pay-as-you-grow
• Moving beyond just disk systems
• Service offerings MSP revival ?

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Thank You

• Richard.Scannell_at_GlassHouse.com