Originating Author: David Vellante
Dave Hitz, NetApp's articulate co-founder turned marketing guy, put up this slide at the analyst meeting in NYC last week. It depicts a vertical slice of a traditional approach to architecting infrastructure where resources (servers, networks, storage, etc) are stovepiped and optimized for applications (largely by application heads). This is a common scene in enterprises where companies mix, match, and manage a sea of heterogeneous storage assets designed to optimize business applications.
There's actually nothing wrong with that picture until you consider that in the Fortune 1000, IT spend as a percent of revenues has dropped from 3.9% in 2000 to 3.0% today. It's simply too expensive to maintain such a 'one off' approach for all applications. While this vector will continue for specialized applications with the most demanding performance requirements (e.g. mainframe and transaction-oriented apps), increasingly customers are looking to put in place more efficient (horizontal) platforms that can flexibly support a wider variety of applications. NetApp envisions virtualized pools that are process- and service-centric and optimized across applications for cost effectiveness.
What is impressive about NetApp's vision is that instead of laying out a scenario where ALL applications standardize on NetApp infrastructure, this view acknowledges that there will be 'zones' of infrastructure established to do the job most effectively. In essence, it underscores the fact that there's an opportunity to clean up big chunks of inefficiency in the data center but certain applications will continue to require best-of-breed optimization for performance, recovery, security, and business resilience and will be tuned vertically within the infrastructure stack.
The implications of this approach for storage architects and admins is a more services-oriented view where storage provides re-usable services across a variety of applications and is optimized for efficiency by reducing suppliers, standardizing on service offerings and, while limiting the choice of application heads, dramatically simplifies storage procurement, installation, provisioning, migration, and retirement. This means certain tasks (e.g. provisioning) can be either automated or transitioned to server or application people within the organization while the storage admin plays more of a service provider role.
The problem with this scenario is that when IT standardizes on a limited set of menu-based services and limiting choice, those with power in the organization will kick, scream, and fight to protect their tier 1 golden geese and concierge-class service levels. The opportunity is to target major pockets of inefficiency and virtualize with VMWare or other approaches. A commitment to initiate storage and server virtualization in tandem will by its very nature address the organizational tensions by 'forcing' standardized approaches to service delivery.
Action Item: Organizations that have the stomach to take a services-oriented approach should commit to pursuing storage and server virtualization in tandem. NetApp's horizontal infrastructure vision can lead to substantial cost savings and efficiencies that every CIO and CFO should consider, or, at least assess the tradeoffs relative to a vertical (purpose built) approach, which for many mainstream applications will prove to be overkill. The main tradeoff of the standardized (horizontal) approach is less choice and the need to refresh the portfolio of standard offerings in order to remain current.
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