SAN Customers and SAN Vendors

Just as politicians like to project an image of reflecting the popular will of their constituencies, vendors often present their products as simply responses to customer demands. The ideal products are the result of careful analysis of customer requirements obtained through in-depth discussions of customer needs. Vendors then apply technology to satisfy those needs, so that rather than imposing new solutions on customers, the new solutions themselves express the will of the customer. This dialectic between customer and vendor ideally drives product development and creates a cycle of innovation based on the customer's evolving business requirements.

The reality, however, is that while customers may know their immediate needs they may be less certain of what issues loom on the horizon. Circumstances may accelerate some requirements or delay others. Unexpected changes in business policies may inject new criteria that cannot be easily satisfied by existing technologies. So while vendors must listen carefully to their customers, they cannot rely solely on customer input or risk trailing behind the market. Consequently, technologists must be able to parse current customer requirements and use those results to project what future needs may be. Trailing the customer may retard technological development; getting too far ahead of the customer may result in new solutions unproductively seeking problems to solve.

The storage networking industry has been driven by both customer requirements and vendor innovation. The basic customer problems storage networking has solved were evident long before viable solutions were available. High availability data access, tape backup, storage consolidation and other issues helped define what solutions storage networking should provide. A pent-up demand moved those solutions quickly into the top tier enterprise networks. The storage industry as a whole, however, failed to respond quickly to the customer issues that arose once SAN products were deployed. Interoperability, complexity, scalability, management and cost continue to inhibit adoption of storage networking for the 85% of the market that continues to use direct-attached storage, as well as large customers that have been unable to scale and extend networked storage across the enterprise.

Trailing somewhat behind customer desires, storage virtualization is responding to customer complaints that shared storage is too complex and too difficult to manage. This is something that vendors did not foresee, or had pushed low on their priorities for product development. As a consequence, a portion of the market is waiting for vendors to catch up before more pervasive implementation will occur.

Likewise, customers early on expressed the desire to implement shared block storage over their traditional IP networks. The initial inhibitors to meeting this need included lack of a high performance topology (since Gigabit Ethernet was not available) and lack of native IP storage protocols. Pioneering vendors have accelerated development of IP storage products in recognition of the substantial investment customers have already made in infrastructure, training and support for their mainstream data communications networks. Migrating SANs into mainstream IP networks thus satisfies long-standing requests by customers for less problematic and less expensive shared storage solutions.

Storage networking will achieve its goals when customers can acquire infrastructure and applications that meet their immediate needs and fulfill the basic criteria of open standards, scalability and extensibility to meet their future ones. To realize this objective, vendors and customers must both lead the storage industry and in common draw the guidelines for its further evolution. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has created the Consumer Council as a vehicle for this interaction so that both vendors and customers can define meaningful objectives for the industry.