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Last week, I had a conversation with a counterpart of mine at another organization who recently left a storage company to join the end-user ranks. During our discourse, he confirmed what I have suspected for some time: Storage vendors largely underestimate the complexity of the end-user storage environments into which they sell. They also lack any solid strategies to simplify them.
This was reinforced in my mind just the other day. I was describing to a sales representative a vexing problem I had. An AIX server needed additional capacity and had the native AIX multipathing software loaded on it. However, that software only works with IBM storage, and I have only EMC and Hitachi Data Systems storage available. So the systems administrator wanted to know which vendor's multipathing software to buy: EMC's, HDS's or Veritas'? So I asked the sales rep what he would recommend.
The sales rep's response: Buy his virtualization software, which works with everyone's storage and eliminates the need for a specific vendor's multipathing software. A few years ago, I might have gotten excited. Now, I just pass.
Would his suggestion have worked? Maybe. But I do not have time to implement another technology that solved a specific problem but created a larger long-term one. Another point product means yet another variable to consider when managing the storage-area network (SAN).
Users are ready to simplify their storage environments. Yet with storage prices dropping, new technologies emerging, vendors focused on quick sales and no quick fix to SAN complexity available, managers face a difficult choice. Either try to buy the right technology for each problem and manage them all or try to buy one technology that meets most of their needs. As for my buddy and me, we are ready to do more of the latter.
Jerome Wendt currently works as a storage engineer and storage analyst. He contributes regularly to a variety of industry trade publications and can be reached at jerome.wendt@att.net.
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