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As data storage needs soar, users have a multitude of options

Have one disk drive talk to another? It's easy enough when copying a 300-Kb memo from the floppy drive to the hard drive on a PC. But it's a whole different story when, like Walter Hinton of ManagedStorage International Inc., five petabytes (or five million billion bytes) of networked data is being managed.

Consider the case of one large banking client of MSI that wanted to replicate data between two sites. The first site was using disk arrays from EMC Corp.; the other was using arrays from Hitachi Data Systems. Complicating matters, each site was using different storage protocols. "Replication between different vendors' systems doesn't work," says Hinton, chief technology officer of the Broomfield, Colo., managed storage service provider. The customer had to "buy more hardware either from EMC or from Hitachi for this replication to take place," he says.

Then the bank's Emulex Corp. host bus adapters (HBAs), which link servers to networks of storage devices, refused to work with the new Linux Web servers being installed. Emulex hadn't yet released a software driver that would allow its HBAs to work in Linux servers, Hinton says. After that, the bank had to buy new HBAs when it "already had an inventory of HBAs that weren't compatible," he adds.

While storage is becoming more critical because it holds the information required for data mining as well as for customer relationship and Web commerce systems, customers and vendors are stymied by the inability of storage hardware (such as disk and tape drives) and storage management software from different vendors to communicate with each other.

This lack of a common storage language raises the cost of managing storage, forces customers to buy more storage hardware than they need and makes it harder for security-conscious companies to easily transfer data among backup facilities. Fed-up customers are sitting on their wallets rather than be locked into a single vendor's hardware, or software, simply because the product can't work with products from other vendors.

Customers Have Long Memories
Aventis Behring, a rapidly growing life sciences company based in King of Prussia, Pa., found itself struggling with a storage challenge similar to Hinton's. The company, which specializes in blood plasma and bleeding disorders, runs critical applications, each of which is connected to its own vital storage. Sustained rapid growth, however, forced Aventis Behring to either continually buy more storage than it needed for each application or risk running short and constraining applications that control vital clinical trials or support production and research operations.

Quickly, managers realized the situation for what it was: a prescription for disaster. At some point,the company was bound to run out of storage for a mission-critical application or money or both.

Complicating the situation was the lack of effective, high-level storage management tools that could manage the storage for all the applications together. "It is very expensive to manage the storage for each application separately," says Behrad Talebzadeh, director/IS infrastructure at Aventis Behring.

Storage vendors hear the demands and have made progress in many areas, such as the ability for storage devices from different vendors to communicate with each other. They also are working on common languages to make it easier for customers to mix and match hardware and software from different vendors.

Once all the incompatibilities are resolved, it's more important today than ever to protect that data. "Recent history has underlined the value of disaster recovery plans," says Andy Lawrence, marketing manager for Kodak's Integrated Imaging Unit.

Management Muddle
Storage interoperability was not so important in the days when most disk drives were attached to mainframe computers in a corporate data center or located inside a departmental server. In such cases, the disk drives and the computers to which they were attached often came from a small well-known group of vendors, were accessed by the same applications and were managed by the same staff.

But this simple storage model collapsed under the weight of increasing amounts of data generated by e-commerce and the growing need to share information among various parts of the same company as well as with customers and suppliers. As companies began storing more data on more types of storage devices, the cost of managing that storage -- and users' access to it -- often grew many times higher than the cost of the storage itself.

Hence, the idea of linking storage devices on their own dedicated networks so the data contained within each device could be more easily accessed by a variety of applications and users. But with networking came its own complexities, as different vendors introduced different backup protocols, different formats for writing data to tape drives, different network standards and different types of software agents for performing backup.

Customers buying, say, a disk array from a major storage vendor must sort through graphs that explain which operating systems, which HBAs, which storage network switches and which version of the switch's firmware (embedded control software) will work with that specific array, says Dianne McAdam, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H.

An even bigger challenge, according to analysts, vendors and customers alike, is to make it easier for different storage management applications to work together. Today, customers are forced to buy one management application that "does maybe three of the five things they really need to do and get another package which does two of the five," McAdam says. "We need these packages to be able to talk to each other, so customers aren't stuck with separate management consoles for each software package."