Right Data, Right NowRight Data, Right Now

In the search for efficiency, managers want to benefit from business-continuity systems, even if no disaster hits. Indoff Inc., a distributor of business products, achieved enough of a return from an HP system that it has ordered an MSA 1000 SAN system for the third quarter to support deployment of an enterprise resource planning application from J.D. Edwards & Co. Indoff used to shut down its systems for about eight hours each night to back up a legacy financial application. "With HP Snapshot technology, we have the shut-down window down to about an hour and a half," says Shawn Faulkingham, senior network engineer. "It lets our field people operate for practically 24 hours a day."

There are still plenty of question marks for the future of storage technology, including emerging standards, new competitors, and the role of services.

Many storage vendors plan to introduce products that use the iSCSI specification, a data transport technology that's supposed to become a standard in the first half of this year. ISCSI is designed to let large blocks of data travel long distances across an IP network or the Internet, which could reduce the cost of storage systems even more. However, CIOs aren't spending much time on iSCSI just yet. They're waiting for the standard to be finalized, and vendors to deliver the first generation of products based on it.

Another wild card is how important storage services -- already popular with small businesses -- will become. Iron Mountain Inc., a company that stores tape drives at undisclosed locations underground to help companies recover from disasters, recently started storing data online for customers that want quick access to backup data in case of outages at their primary sites. It also will serve as a company's primary data storage site. One not-so-small customer taking advantage of Iron Mountain's services is the U.S. Small Business Administration. "We were doing backup and recovery ourselves with tape drives and information resource managers at each site," says , director of the office of communications services. "We always ran into human error and sometimes couldn't recover information, so we wanted to remove that from the picture." The Small Business Administration turned to Iron Mountain for backup, recovery, outside data storage, and data archival at $35 to $50 per gigabyte. The SBA is storing a couple of hundred gigabytes with the vendor and is able to recover lost files within two minutes.

New vendors and technologies will also shape storage choices. PC market leader Dell Computer entered the high-end storage business last year through a partnership with EMC. This year, it's partnering with data-switch vendors Brocade and McData and host bus adapter vendors Emulex and Q Logic to deliver data over storage networks via features that include locking and encryption. "We hope to lock down who has access to the data on the network," says Gerald Longoria, Dell's product marketing manager for storage networks.

Data switch vendor Vixel Corp. takes a different approach. Later this year, it plans to introduce a 20-port switch the size of a chip that can go inside servers or storage systems. Several of the leading server and storage vendors are working with or talking to the vendor about incorporating Vixel's technology into their products, says Beth White, VP of marketing. The switch could reduce the workload on hard disks and monitor their performance. "We think we'll increase availability up to 20%, reducing latency and downtime related to hard-disk drives," White says. "We'll isolate rogue drives, diagnose drives, and do health monitoring."

What's happening in the storage market reflects two megatrends in business technology: the demand for better information that's closer to real time and the continued pressure on IT departments to lower costs by running more efficiently. "Storage needs are growing faster than hard disks are getting cheaper. And storage resources are growing faster than storage-management productivity is improving," says Rob Nieboer, director of business management for growth markets at vendor StorageTek. "For customers, that's a double whammy." It's up to storage-technology vendors to help soften the blow.

Illustration by Celia Johnson
Photo of Hill by D.A. Peterson