Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
The storage services market is poised for a rapid evolution as the regulatory environment places greater requirements on storage archiving, backup and related activities in businesses, as networking infrastructure technologies continue to evolve to support more complex large file structures and as users and suppliers become more familiar with the application-level realities of what's required from storage subsystems.
Storage services in many respects are not new. In the 1960's and 1970's, the first set of storage services were introduced namely as media services whereby vendors would agree to pick up, transport and store specific media (e.g. tapes, microfiche, etc.) for companies and store them in highly secure facilities. In the 1990's some suppliers attempted to evolve storage services to an online model and essentially provide 'data tone' for the enterprise. For the most part, however, these suppliers failed to secure a market presence as they did a poor job of reconciling the fact that the data being targeted for these services often had very high write to read ratios which made it difficult to move stateful data from one place to another in an online manner quickly and cheaply.
However in the last few years, we've seen new protocols for Web interactions, new standards for application development and new approaches to institutionalizing IT emerge that has made the idea of storage services much more attractive and economically viable. Big network pipes, new protocols for storage access and new conventions for metadata are furthering this market very aggressively and we will start to see new ecosystems for storage services emerge that play off the acceptance in the user community of storage services as a viable value proposition. As users consider what types of storage services to purchase and to depend on, they must focus on a few very simple issues. First is the number of users supported where the more users that require common services, the more attractive the storage service. Secondly, the read:write ratios of applications where the higher the read:write ratio, the more the application is a candidate for storage services. And finally, the degree of process integration associated with the application that ultimately leads to things like long lock times being placed on pieces of data even in a predominantly read environment.
As a consequence, as users evaluate their applications and suppliers in these terms, we'll start to see evolution in the storage services market, essentially revolve around three poles: 1) the availability of access method protocols and standards in those protocols as well as standards in metadata; 2) the organization of services that are increasingly just-in-time-like so that allocation can take place as near to a run time request as possible and 3) very importantly, the adoption of conventions for pricing models that will allow a user to truly compare and contrast the use of an external supplier with their own cost structure to make an informed decision about how to best organize storage capabilities within their organization.
Action Item: It's an exciting time in the storage services market precisely because the conventions associated with buying storage services are pretty well accepted. However to take full advantage of the rapid evolution in organization of storage service offerings, users must pay close attention to a few critical elements to ensure they get the right set of services now that are capable of adapting as their business needs evolve.
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