|
|
 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
| |
OCTOBER 28, 2003
Everybody Has More to Store [Page 2 of 2] DIVERGENT APPROACHES. Even as software innovation sped up, advances in storage hardware slowed during the tech downturn, since customers began replacing their storage boxes every four to five years vs. every three years in the 1990s, says Phil Goodwin, senior program director at technology consultancy Meta Group. Hardware makers are thus trying to resuscitate demand by experimenting with different configurations, creating a source of considerable debate in storage circles. One camp -- notably, Dell -- advocates building storage farms of cheap servers (a so-called modular approach). "You pay as you grow," says Bruce Kornfeld, director of Dell's enterprise marketing business. The opposition, headed by IBM, argues for a monolithic architecture, in which a customer buys a big, expensive box and grows into it. The modular approach ruled in the penny-pinching days of the downturn -- but is no longer a given. This year, big high-end boxes could increase their share of the overall market vs. last year's 31.9%, predicts Charlotte Rancourt, a research director at tech consultancy IDC in Framingham, Mass. After all, one big box might allow for better network performance by storing all mission-critical files. PAY-PER-USE SERVICES. Some players claim they offer a middle solution. EMC sells a storage box that can work as either a modular or a monolithic device, says Ken Steinhardt, EMC's director of technology analysis. It can be loaded with enough horsepower to serve as a stand-alone machine or slimmed down enough to be an element in a storage farm. One thing both camps do agree on is the attractiveness of on-demand pricing. Over the past two months, HP says, it has begun seeing more interest in its pay-per-use service, in which customers buy storage from farms housed either at HP or the customer, paying only for the amount they use. That's a sensible approach for outfits that test new drugs or develop new software, tasks for which storage needs fluctuate wildly, says HP's Schultz. IBM makes similar arrangements, says Samson. Some of the newest storage entrants are finding a niche in helping customers with big, expensive systems moderate their costs without doing a sweeping upgrade. For instance, Storage Tek (STK ) in Louisville, Colo., sells what it calls a serial Advanced Technology Attachment -- multiple cheap hard drives strung together. Companies use them in place of high-priced boxes to store older data they use less often -- and don't mind retrieving more slowly. "Customers want to increase their storage capacity while staying within their budgets," declares Patrick Martin, StorageTek's chairman, president, and CEO. RATHER NOT SWITCH. Competition is also mounting in services -- another major part of the incumbents' business. Revenues of GlassHouse Technologies, a privately held Framingham (Mass.) storage consultancy, have been growing 70% quarter-over-quarter this year. About 80% of GlassHouse's business comes from devising ways to make whatever storage equipment and software corporations already have work more efficiently, says President and CEO Mark Shirman. For instance, a customer's existing practices might result in 200 copies of the same document being stored indefinitely -- leading to unnecessary expense, Shirman explains. His solution is to revise corporate policies so that fewer copies of each document are stored. With an estimated 80% of the storage business, the top five companies in the industry are too powerful to displace. Their big corporate customers are so familiar with their systems as to have a bias against switching, says Anders Lofgren, an analyst at tech consultancy Forrester Research. The industry leaders also aren't standing still: HP now designs its storage software in consultation with its network-server team -- so that a customer can pluck a disk drive from its MSA1000 storage device and put it into a server, giving customers more flexibility in how to use their resources, says Schultz. Like StorageTek, HP also offers cheaper products for storing older data. Many of the big players are also strengthening their product lines, particularly in software, through acquisitions. On Oct. 14, EMC announced that it would acquire content-management-software maker Documentum (DCTM ) for $1.7 billion in stock. And in July, EMC bought Legato, a maker of backup and recovery software. In short, the competition in storage is leading to an impressive array of enhancements. And no matter who delivers them, buyers are bound to benefit.
 By Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now!Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2003, Bloomberg L.P.Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
Printer-Friendly Version