A Matter of Trust

"They were just not ready to hand over control of the server to software," explains Robin Purohit, vice president of the product management availability products group at Veritas, Mountain View, Calif. "It took them a couple of years to build some trust [with the tool] before they started to turn it on."

Veritas has had experiences where it has tried to sell a new automation feature, only to see the customer shrink back and call it "black art." The vendor already is seeing a similar reaction with its SRM and SANPoint Control product: Only 20 percent of its customers use the automation tool within those products. "My belief is, every time you try to automate something new, you are going to see this process of IT building some trust," Purohit says.

That's an important point for VARs to keep in mind when setting out to sell storage-management software. And that paranoia is not unfounded. Customers "have been burned in the past," says Darren McBride, president of Sierra Computers & Training. For example, as a solution provider, McBride has spent many hours with clients dealing with data-mirroring solutions. The automated failover has caused numerous hassles because, more often than not, the drives experience a minor malfunction rather than full-blown catastrophic failure. Vendors can never replicate the kinds of failures customers experience in the field, so software gets confused, and IT managers then spend hours trying to determine which drive actually experienced the hiccup. "The problem with [automated-software tools] is customers may not have used them often enough," McBride adds.

But storage management will never get easy, or cheaper, until the process becomes automated. So storage vendors are developing software that automates some of the most tedious, labor-intensive tasks. For example, Veritas' SANPoint Control can detect trends in the file system of a database and initiate more capacity based on thresholds. It automatically allocates and configures storage online. Another product, OPForce, can detect low CPU power and automatically serve up more horsepower. Moreover, Hewlett-Packard is working on policy-based management tools that automate the placement of data on storage resources, based on its age and importance to business needs. That includes automating jobs, such as storage provisioning, storage diagnostics, reporting and self-repair.

"IT budgets are pretty flat," says Mark Sorenson, HP's vice president and general manager of the NSS storage software division. "So what do you do if each storage administrator has to manage 50 percent more storage than last year? The answer is automated tools."

Sorenson agrees that customers are wary of certain automation solutions, especially those that entail disaster-recovery and replication. For instance, a bank with its headquarters in New York certainly wants to make sure it's dealing with a real-life crisis before its system fails-over to a secondary site. But, he says, there is a difference between automating a failover mechanism and automating a tedious task like storage provisioning.

"I think the risk factor is significantly lower," Sorenson says. "It's one thing to fail-over an entire bank to another site in New Jersey. It's another thing to say, 'Oh, that provisioning step did not work right. I have to go back and fix it.' That has no overall impact on anyone."

Tips To Help You Sell Automation Software:

• Offer remote monitoring as part of the deal to give the customer some piece of mind.
• Present a cost analysis that shows how automation cuts down on salary expenses.
• Give examples of case studies.