Software: The New Storage Game

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

We are not going to see much of a change in this trend. What we will continue to see is the price-per-megabyte dropping, along with functions and features once found only in the high-end migrating to the midrange, and more vendors rolling out modular server and storage subsystems. And when industry experts talk about modularized hardware, they are talking about systems that are built like bricks layered within a wall that can be more easily upgraded and scaled.

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

Now the game that has taken the place of hardware is software. Storage, as a whole, is in the throes of developing storage-management software for open systems. It's about products like virtualization, automation, storage-resource management and life-cycle data management, to name a few. For instance, VARBusiness' 2003 Annual Report Card research has delegated storage-management software as a standalone category, and companies like Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard, Veritas Software and EMC all scored fairly high marks,ranging from 73 to 75,in their products' quality, richness of features and technical innovation.

"We really do believe that it is software where we should be placing most of our investments 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 are all building a storage-management strategy. Translation: Not all of these companies have the complete picture. 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 of that.

"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 adds. "It's the clearest point of value ... in terms of what you can deliver for a customer. That is where you help manage storage administrators' productivity. It 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 a lot of vendors are making a bid into the storage-software market. Take Silicon Graphics, which just announced its own storage initiative. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company traditionally known for its supercomputers, high-end servers and visualization technologies 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 solutions to customers. Moreover, the SGI and AppIQ partnership includes a co-development deal to bring open-standards SAN management and storage-resource management to high-performance computing.

AppIQ's software is designed to manage storage from the application-object layer, such as the database, tablespace and mailbox, down to the host, HBAs and switches as well as the 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 a hardware vendor like HP joins up and within a few weeks, AppIQ will write 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, 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 is going to determine the market leader. And according to IBM's Colby, this new journey that storage is on will continue for a long time to come.

"It won't finish," he says. "It's just like systems management. 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." n