Software: The New Storage Game

But that does not mean companies are buying less storage capacity. In fact, overall storage capacity continues to outpace revenue, growing 36 percent year-over-year to 181.6 petabytes shipped during the second quarter, according to IDC.

We are not going to see much of a change in that trend because we will continue to see the price-per-megabyte drop, with functions and features once found only in the high end migrating to the midrange. In addition, more vendors will roll out modular server and storage subsystems that are built like bricks layered within a wall and can be more easily upgraded and scaled.

"Once you start to modularize [hardware], the game is over," says Ash Ashutosh, founder, executive vice president and CTO of AppIQ, a Burlington, Mass.-based storage software start-up.

So now the name of the game is software. In fact, VARBusiness' 2003 Annual Report Card research has delegated storage management software as a standalone category, and companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Tivoli and Veritas all scored fair to high marks for their products' quality, richness of features and technical innovation.

"We really do believe that it is software we should be placing most of our investments [in] right now," says Daniel R. Colby, general manager for storage systems within the IBM Systems Group. "The real answer is a software layer that makes things more productive."

If you ask most storage vendors, they'll say they're building a storage-management strategy. Translation: Some have certain pieces in place that either need to be further developed or integrated, or they are in the process of acquiring products that will further build out a software portfolio. EMC with its Legato acquisition and Veritas Software with its Precise Software and Jareva Technologies acquisitions are prime examples.

"I think a lot of us have been slow to deliver on a lot of the promises of what could happen in storage-systems software," Colby says. "It's the clearest point of value...in terms of what you can deliver for a customer%85It gives them the tools they need to be better at what they are supposed to do---less of an art, more of science."

But now many vendors are making a bid to get into the storage-software market. Silicon Graphics, for example, last month rolled out InfiniteStorage, a series of hardware and software products designed for data management. Interestingly, SGI teamed up with AppIQ to provide storage-utility-management software for high-performance applications working on SANs. SGI will market and resell AppIQ's enterprise SAN and storage-resource-management (SRM) solutions to customers. Moreover, the SGI and AppIQ partnership includes a co-development deal to bring open-standards SAN management and SRM to high-performance computing.

AppIQ's software is designed to manage storage from the application-object layer down to the host, HBAs, switches and subsystem spindle. How is AppIQ planning to compete? Well, it's not going to bother by going against everyone else at the device level. For that, it has formed the CIM IQ Partner Program, in which switch vendor McData joins up and within a few weeks, AppIQ writes a "provider" that converts a device's native application-program interface to the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMIS).

"We are going to level the playing field on device interfaces," says Doug Cahill, AppIQ's vice president of business development and strategy. "It's the [application] layer that we are going to compete in."

So far, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, McData, Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems, to name a few, are on board with AppIQ's program. Most storage vendors are getting ready for this new phase, where software will determine the market leader. And, according to IBM's Colby, this new journey will continue for a long time to come.

"It's just like systems management," he says. "Systems management is a journey that started 25 years ago, and I don't see any end to the tools and techniques people will use to further automate the systems environment they are in. I feel the same way about storage. It will just grow over time."