Hardware Vendors Line Up Storage Offerings

Peter Judge,

Storage is the uncontrolled part of IT expenditure. That’s a temptation that few hardware vendors can resist.

Simplification is in the air at Sun, since Oracle has announced that its Sun salespeople will no longer be selling the high-end USP-V storage arrays from Japan’s HDS, which most observers see as a sure sign of the end of the Sun-HDS relationship.

HDS is also a major power in Hewlett-Packard’s storage business, which could benefit from Sun abandoning the big HDS arrays. HP however, is just now embarking on some marketing based around the fact that most people see storage as a problem – with a “challenge” to cellebrate the tenth anniversary of its XP Disk Arrays. Tell HP your storage problem at the Challenge HP site, and you could win some conslutancy designed to solve your problem (presumably with HP products). If you don’t win of course, you have probably become an HP prospect for consultancy and products.

IBM tidies up

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IBM also has a strong services arm, is pitching very strongly about providing efficiencies to users. It originally made a bid to buy Sun, hoping to get the company’s SSD expertise among other things. But having failed to get hold of the company, IBM has pressed ahead, showing solid support for SSDs in its servers and storage products.

IBM includes storage products from NetApp, and has been making many announcements of its own. The Virtual Disk System (VDS) is very much aimed at businesses that want to make their storage more efficient, providing virtualised disks which can be easily provisioned and altered. Above that, users are expected to move to the XIV storage system aimed for the cloud.

The company also has SONAS – the scale out network attached storage system which is built on top of DataDirect storage boxes.

Sift the pitches carefully

So all the big sytem vendors are out there pitching. They are all offering some help with storage efficiency, and pitching for a share of the storage budget.

The drawback is that all of them have a grand plan – and want users to buy into it. Grand plans are a good idea of course, but they require long-term planning and careful evaluation on the part of the user, and our evidence is that most users are so pushed for time, they are making short-term knee-jerk storage decisions.

When you make a long-term move – which vision will you opt for?