Preface

Nearly three years have transpired since the publication of The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management , an extraordinarily well-received primer covering the technology and trends in data storage. I would like to thank everyone who read the first Holy Grail book, and I am delighted to report that, since its publication, knowledgeable authors have published at least six additional titles around the same subject matter.

Most of the new titles contribute valuable information about the latest storage innovations and help contribute to the growing knowledgebase of contemporary storage technology. The net effect is that a long-ignored area of IT seems now to be getting the attention and historical record that it merits.

Our collective authors' egos aside, the success of all of these books is owed, in the final analysis, not so much to their content or presentation, but to the compelling nature of the subject itself. We should take no pride that our books have been successful, given the dire need that exists today for improved management of the burgeoning data being amassed in most organizations.

Over the past three years, many storage managers have reported to me that they are, quite simply, at wit's end ”desperate to build storage infrastructure for their organizations that delivers measurable business value and also conforms to the budgetary and resource constraints imposed on all businesses by the current economy. They scour the trade press and bookstores for everything written on the subject of storage. They scavenge the presentations made by vendors and so-called industry experts at conferences, workshops, and trade shows for a hint about best practices and emerging standards. Basically, they seek any source of information that might provide guidance that will help them to achieve their goals.

Under the circumstances, I take no pride from ongoing royalties derived from the sales of the Holy Grail of Data Storage Management , though my publisher and my creditors are certainly delighted. As a veteran IT professional, and now as a CEO and founder of two companies charged with empowering storage consumers and developing data management as its own discipline within the IT field, I feel that I am simply doing my job.

So it is with this book. The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management , which you now hold in your hands, is not a revised and expanded version of my earlier book. In fact, this Holy Grail is not intended to be a primer at all, though I hope it will have the value of providing actionable information about some of the latest developments in storage technology.

This book is, pure and simple, an extended critique of contemporary storage technology and the industry that provides it. If I do my job correctly, this book will enable you to undertake successfully what is the most difficult and challenging task you face today: developing a critical view that will help you to filter out the vendor marketing hype that is so pervasive around network storage technology so that you can make better and more strategic design and acquisition decisions for the storage infrastructures you are tasked to build, support, and manage.

The original Holy Grail book provided a foundation in basic storage nomenclature , technology, and topologies that you need to begin building a true storage infrastructure. It is useful in understanding the content of this book, as well.

Above all, the earlier book emphasized the need to make the storage infrastructure that you design and build manageable. The book emphasized that, without management, you have nothing appropriately termed "storage infrastructure." Without effective management, you have only a morasse of equipment and cabling that will require the work of a growing (and increasingly unacceptable) staff to administer. The labor costs of unmanaged storage are the largest part of storage cost of ownership and will bankrupt your organization over time if unresolved .

In the years since the publication of the first Holy Grail , it became abundantly clear to me that another, very different kind of book, needed to be written. Knowledge of basic building blocks of storage and recognition of the primacy of storage management was not enough for those who were tasked with the role of storage planning and management to do their jobs effectively.

In fact, I came to realize that the title of storage manager provided an inadequate description of what you do for a living. Whether or not it is clearly stated in your job description, your work is not about managing storage devices. Rather, it is your mission to (1) provision storage capacity to meet the requirements of application data, paying close attention to the costs associated with data hosting, and, (2) to leverage any available architecture, topology, or device functionality to protect data from corruption or loss.

In the final analysis, you do not manage storage: You manage and protect data, your organization's most irreplaceable asset. You are not a storage manager, but a data manager.

As a data manager, the central challenge that you confront is the challenge of creating cost-effective and manageable infrastructure with the devices and management tools provided for your use by the storage industry. Unfortunately, the industry ”apparently oblivious to real-world requirements confronting your shop, instead focused myopically on the advancement of proprietary, noninteroperable technology and market share improvement ”isn't making your life any easier.

Month after month, you are besieged by marketing pitches from the vendor community pronouncing as the panacea for all that ails storage half-baked architectures and products that aren't quite ready for business primetime. Just sifting through the marketing hype to discern the underlying technological foundation so that it can be fairly and reasonably assessed can be a daunting task.

Perhaps the most hyped panacea of all in the storage world has been "networked storage" ”a high-concept storage architecture whose manifestation in current products is so limited that it delivers very little of the business value proposition advanced by its own visionaries. It is a central theme of this book that none of what the industry currently terms networked storage is actually networked at all: All storage today is server-attached storage by another name . What's worse is that many of the impediments to building intelligent networked storage infrastructures trace their origins to this simple fact.

From this assertion, you may begin to perceive the difference between this book and its predecessor. What you are now reading is not a revised and expanded edition of the original Holy Grail primer. It is intended to help the reader to develop a more critical view of products and architecture in order to make better product acquisition decisions, build better infrastructure, and ”just maybe ”to negotiate better deals with those who are seeking to sell technology to the storage consumer.

I am reasonably sure that this book will not receive the same warm reception from the vendor community that was enjoyed by its predecessor. The first Holy Grail was widely adopted by vendors to provide basic storage training for salespersons and customers. From their perspective, it was a "feel good" book, underscoring the many worthwhile accomplishments of the industry up to that point and echoing the widely held platitude that improved storage management was needed. No products or architectures were critiqued or vendors criticized in the first book, which implicitly held that "storage is what it is."

In this book, the proverbial gloves are off. After nearly four years of working with clients who were endeavoring (usually with great pain) to deploy the industry's version of networked storage technology, participating in (and often eavesdropping on) standards groups and industry initiatives and associations, conducting informal chats with industry insiders about "known deficits" in their products, and synthesizing what had I learned in print and on-line columns read by nearly a half million storage technology consumers on a weekly and monthly basis, I have developed a somewhat different attitude than I had in 1999. This new view is reflected in the Holy Grail of Network Storage Management .

I now believe that, to arrive at a better understanding of storage technology so that it can be applied judiciously to meet business needs, storage managers need to start asking hard questions of their vendors, ranting and railing about all the snake-oil that is being sold, and generally making themselves into troublemakers from the vendor's perspective, while serving as true ombudsmen for the interests of their own organizations ”the consumers of technology. Were this to happen in any kind of numbers , the result would be the beginning of a trend in which consumers demanded the kinds of features and functions they required in a voice so loud and so compelling that vendors would have little choice but to listen.

This "in your face" attitude is probably not what vendors have in mind when they claim that their best customers are educated consumers. It will be interesting to see how well this book resonates with the vendor community as its perspective on the industry is a might less cordial than the vendors are probably used to.

For you, the reader, I hope that this book will help you to puzzle out the issues of storage today and arrive at your own conclusions about the best technologies and architectures to pursue for your companies. This goal is shared by my consulting, training, and research & analysis practices, which were formalized in 2003 as Toigo Partners International LLC and The Data Management Institute LLC.

Please note that, as a living appendix to this book, a website has been set up at www.stormgt.org , for your use. If you want to dig deeper into the issues expressed here or that develop over the next four years (or however long it takes for me to convince a publisher that it is time for volume three in this series), please visit www.it-sense.org and www.datainstitute.org for access to the consulting and information services of Toigo Partners International and The Data Management Institute respectively.

So, let's commence the next leg of our quest for the Holy Grail of Network Storage Management . Thanks in advance for your interest and feedback.

Jon William Toigo