Storage Vendors are Evil

Well, okay, perhaps evil is a bit strong, but I like provocative titles

For years I worked in the Enterprise Content Management field and for many more years than that I have worked with and been interested in digital storage technologies. My undergrad thesis was the first known online survey of NFS file systems which I published (with the help of the CS Department Chair) in the Communications of the ACM. I'm pretty sure it's easy to find using standard search engines (if you are interested). I was always frustrated that the economics of storage systems seemed lost on my colleagues, I understood but was frustrated.

Storage is an inherently hardware-driven solution that has a natural and predictable refresh cycle. A storage sale is almost always done with an eye to the future, sometimes explicitly (because the IT department has been burned before) and sometimes implicitly as part of the particular solution being proposed but always with the next sale in mind.

There is little to no erosion of profit or revenue by moving functionality from the software (logic) layer down to the storage layer, but the important point for the vendors is that the more functionality put into the storage layer, the stickier the storage layer becomes. The hardware vendors will claim this is good “for performance and price” but in fact neither are really true.

Take retention, for instance. If the retention of a piece of content is controlled through the hardware, then the hardware cannot easily be replaced until all the content under retention control is disposed of. If the storage layer provides such services as compression, encryption, replication, and migration (ILM/HSM or tiered storage) then it is all but impossible to move away from that storage vendor’s future plans.

And the storage vendors know this!

• Can a vendor whose revenue and profit stream tied to the sale of hardware (spinning disks) really have an incentive to reduce your storage costs?

• Can you be sure that your storage vendor today will have the best solution for tomorrow? Technologies change, often and quickly and not all vendors will be able to agile enough to stay up.

• How is the ILM/HSM software licensed? Does the license cost increase with capacity?

• Do you have the freedom to deploy your storage infrastructure the way you want to?

• Can you provide storage services like compression, encryption, replication etc for free or are they yet another add on license?

• Do you really believe that your storage vendor is after your best interest? Or are they simply nterested in locking you in to their strategy?

There are choices out there, especially for the small-to-medium deployments. There are smaller vendors, smarter vendors, more flexible solutions – there are options. When I was buying large storage systems, I steered away from the Tier 1 vendors and I have never regretted doing so. I'll not publicly single out any particular vendor, but I will say that the bigger you are the less likely it is that I'd buy from you.