The Future of Storage Area Networks

1
The Future of StorageArea Networks

• Randy Kerns
• Evaluator Group, Inc.
• www.evaluatorgroup.com

2
Agenda

• Current situation
• Environments
• Future
• 1 year
• 3 years
• 5 years
• Summary

3
Level Set

• Survey says
• Changes monthly
• Accelerating pace
• Reasons for deployment today
• Storage consolidation
• Backup
• Easy cost justification

4
Level Set

• Environments
• Enterprise
• Divided into large / medium / small
• Departmental
• New E-business
• SSPs
• Professional services

5
Future 1 year

• Pace accelerates
• Strategic decisions are made
• SAN Management strategy
• Storage management
• Storage network management
• Virtualization solution (abstraction of storage)
• The big issue in administration

6
Future 1 year

• Vendors
• Many offerings
• Different approaches (Evaluator classifications)
• Metadata server
• SAN Storage Manager
• Distributed Management
• SAN Manager

7
Future 1 year

• No one winner
• Many good solutions to choose from
• Departmental solutions
• Greatest opportunity for vendors
• Packaged solutions attractive
• Limit on overall amount of administrative cost
  reduction due to span of abstraction
• Cost sensitive

8
Future 1 year

• No one winner
• Enterprise will likely choose one solution
• Greatest business value from SAN management and
  abstraction solution
• Will be SAN to SAN connections with different
  solutions
• Different decision makers
• Solutions are maturing at different times

9
Future 1 year

• Because of large market growth
• Many opportunities
• Unconventional / different types will have some
  success
• Less opportunity in the enterprise
• New E-business will be best opportunity
• Still need to deliver in 2001

10
Future 1 year

• Customer will benefit
• Centralized storage management
• File sharing / move towards data sharing
• Provide enterprise-class capabilities
• Can accommodate the growth of storage
• Maintain control
• Greatly reduce the administrative costs
• DATA processing is a competitive issue

11
Future 3 years

• SANs will be commonplace
• 10 years ago RAID was new
• Remember LAN deployment
• Still will be multiple solutions
• Additional advanced functions implemented
• Via SAN computing element
• Open systems storage will be driven to commodity
  pricing
• Mainframe storage will still command premium

12
Future 5 years

• 90 of storage sold in enterprise will be SAN
  attached
• Will start to see new infrastructure enter the
  enterprise
• Enterprise infrastructure change infrequently
• Huge investment, large risk, operational changes
  are difficult

13
Future 5 years

• InfiniBand will move out from servers
• Connect to existing fibre channel infrastructures
  through bridges
• Will start to see native InfiniBand devices
• Cost will be issue volume drives cost down
• Maturity of storage products takes time
• Will initially see in workgroup and departmental
  solutions
• Mainframe will start to be active part of SAN
• Beyond sharing the plumbing

14
Summary

• Storage is vitally important to IT
• Major purchase
• Administrative costs are battleground
• The way storage is handled is changing
• Enabled by abstraction
• Driven by growth
• Vendors recognize opportunity
• Overall an interesting business to be in