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Computerworld -
Palm Desert, Calif.
Storage networking technology is being pitched as the rescue vehicle for companies in danger of being buried under an avalanche of data. But experienced users warned at a Computerworld-sponsored conference here last week that building a networked storage architecture can cause rumbling in its own right.
Hesitant Users Take Long-Term View
In these tough economic times, it appears that the days when managers made storage technology purchasing decisions based on factors like improved data backup speeds may be over. Companies are now focusing on total cost of ownership and the long-term returns that storage investments can bring - and they're not spending quite as freely.
The trend was apparent when both EMC Corp. and Network Appliance Inc. announced that earnings for their most recent quarters would be below expectations.
Joe Tucci, president and CEO of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, said first-quarter earnings are now expected to come in at around $394 million, about 10% lower than what financial analysts had previously estimated. He cited "some purchase hesitation from our customers" as the cause.
Network Appliance, a maker of midmarket storage appliances in Sunnyvale, Calif., said its fourth-quarter revenue is expected to be 20% to 25% less than that of the previous quarter. The firm blamed "delays in customer orders."
Taking an economically prudent, long-term view toward storage spending was a recurring theme among the more than 2,000 attendees at last week's Storage Networking World Conference.
Jeff Kizlik, a senior systems engineer at Best Buy Co. in Eden Prairie, Minn., said the electronics retailer in February installed a SAN that backs up 6TB of data daily. But, he added, the conference opened his eyes to the fact that the network was an investment, not just a technology purchase. "When we get back, we need to think about the future a little more," Kizlik said.
Before a storage-area network architecture can be built to handle all of a company's data, existing IT resources have to be accounted for in order to provide an accurate starting view, noted Stevan Arbona, a consulting project leader at The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York. "If you can't measure a process, you can't manage it," he said.
To help cope with the doubling of its data annually, Goldman Sachs is considering a move away from locally attached storage into a networked setup supporting dynamic volume distribution, management and sizing. Included in the plan is the consolidation of more than 700 servers into a smaller number of systems.
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