Interview: StorageNetworks exec on the importance of listening to customers

PETER BELL, CEO of StorageNetworks, knows his company is in the right market at the right time. While a recent wave of storage hardware vendors such as Hitachi and Fujitsu have urgently tried to re-make themselves into storage software companies to offset their falling hardware margins, StorageNetworks and its

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STORos StorageManager 5.0 storage management software have been enjoying customer wins such as EDS and The Ford Motor Co. Bell sat down with InfoWorld Senior Writer Dan Neel to chat about the current state of the storage industry and how customers are facing its challenges.

InfoWorld: With the advantage of being a pure-play storage software vendor, how do you see the storage market changing for companies that sell storage hardware?

Bell: Ours is sort of the same advantage I think EMC had 10 years ago by the fact that they were a server vendor. One of the challenges 10 years ago for server vendors was that if they made the storage real efficient it would put less value on the server. And that's where EMC's focus allowed them to become a great company with great products, because clearly they saw that the value is really in the information more than [in] the server that processes the information. The same thing has happened in the storage world. Now that [storage] boxes are commodities, the value is really in the software that allows customers to manage them. I think that most customers are looking to centralize at least the management and administration of IT and provide services back to their users on their networks, and that's where our software really provides value and a better environment.

InfoWorld: What are you hearing most from storage customers today?

Bell: Most of the guys that I've talked to are really saying, "I have to continue to run my operation ... to support the business, but I've got to do it with a lot less today [because] my boss is driving down costs." But at the same time they are saying, "I can't decrease service levels at all." And since storage is really the center of that, well ... we can provide a very simple-to-implement and very robust scalability in a tool that supports their SAN storage, that supports their direct attached storage, that supports their network attached storage, and supports their backup and recovery environment, as opposed to having six or seven tools which don't all talk together.

InfoWorld: Tell me about interoperability between mixed vendor storage devices. Vendors claim they have it, customers say they don't.

Bell: The storage industry has been wrestling with interoperability since I entered the industry in 1986, and long before that. We have an interoperability lab that we put in place about three years ago, and that really provides a strong set of capabilities and everything is documented. So if we go to a customer and they say, "I have Brocade data switches and Emulex host bust adapters. I have EMC and Compaq storage, and I'm running Solaris, NT, and Linux, and I want all this stuff to work together and I want a service-level assurance for my administrators." Well, we'll provide not only the software but also the interoperability that's documented and proven in a lab. And these capabilities are repeatable through process methodology. So, it's software interoperability, then process methodology, and we're doing that today in some of the biggest shops in the world. EDS is the biggest I know of. They have 13 data centers around the world. They chose our software and related services about four [or] five months ago.

InfoWorld: A new organization led by Quantum, called the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative, claims the biggest problem with storage backup is that users don't trust it. What do you do about that?

Bell: I find that to be pretty accurate. But without having a baseline for storage performance, you can't measure improvement. So one of things that we've been doing for customers that I think really sets us apart from the competition is that with many customers we start by doing an assessment of what they already have. We've developed a set of tools that give utilization reporting, and -- unfortunately or fortunately, depending how you look at it -- a customer environment is typically only 25 to 35 percent utilized and they're only meeting their backup window [about] 50 percent of the time. And you know the three things that customers say? "Give me an estimate of my utilization, give [me] an estimate of how much of my backup is within the window, and give me an understanding of my baseline of availability." And then by applying our technology, customers can take that baseline and improve it.

InfoWorld: StorageNetworks also offers storage outsourcing services. How are customers making the choice between outsourcing as opposed to bringing the responsibility of storage in-house?

Bell: I think there are two things that are happening in outsourcing simultaneously. A significant amount of outsourcing going on [is] not just in storage but in the overall IT industry. Customers look at the storage environment in the context of their overall IT environment, which includes their application development and their spending on infrastructure and data center operations, so many are looking to outsourcing. But I also think that there's a set of customers [who] are looking to take a proven technology [and] bring that technology in-house to really provide a utility-like service, internal to their business. So, much like a user in a big company might go to the help desk for PC support, I think the same thing is happening now with key parts of the IT infrastructure. And storage is probably one of the most important parts of that infrastructure. So, I think that there is both a trend towards outsourcing in many environments where the IT cost is getting to be too high, and at the same time there is also a trend in many environments to bring technology in-house to manage their environment more efficiently and to deliver utility like services back to their enterprise.

InfoWorld: I'm glad you mentioned the word utility. Is utility computing a palatable proposition for enterprise companies today? Do they see a place for it in their business?

Bell: I think so. I mean, almost everyone I talk to is using the word "service levels." So they want to be able to deploy technology that allows them to really provide their service levels. Because often their IT department has either a formal or implied contract for availability, for uptime, and for data recovery. And as customers deploy technology, they're looking at things like charge back. So, similar to a centralized telecommunications department [that] shows each department [their] phone usage, the same things is now happening with storage. I think that the whole idea of service levels and utility computing is clearly catching on in various industries today.

InfoWorld: I haven't heard you use the word "virtualization" yet. How come?

Bell: The reason I don't say virtualization is because I think I spend more time listening to customers than maybe [to] what the vendors are pitching. And I have yet to [hear] a CIO ask me for virtualization -- not one -- and I probably make five sales calls a week. Customers are looking for the baseline of their environment, they're looking for ways to improve it. Virtualization is a means to improve the utility of storage. So I think what you're going to see in the storage industry, as hardware becomes much more of a commodity, is that customers are going to look for drag-and-drop capacity and have that capacity tied to a service level around recoverability, around replication, and around data availability, and virtualization will be a piece of the overall four capabilities that that enterprise utility delivers to their users.

InfoWorld: IT budgets are tight, nothing new there. But is there any storage product that just automatically goes in the shopping cart, regardless of price?

Bell: I wish! I don't think so. Two or three years ago a lot was going into the shopping cart. I think that now it's a time of pragmatism in the IT world. Many users have been burned because they may have deployed technologies that didn't have a clear value proposition or they deployed applications that didn't have the right infrastructure to scale and, therefore, never got the business value. So I think that it's time for companies, ours included, to do a good job of listening to the customer, of understanding what the challenges are. And that means if a customer is wrestling with, "Hey, my utilization needs to be improved and I don't really understand where my data is sitting. I can't classify my data. I'm concerned about recoverability. I'm concerned about availability." Then it's our job to invite customers to do things with a very short-term, realizable metric. So as opposed to saying, "In two years, this will all be up and running," it's worth it to show you something where every 90 days you can get continuous measurable improvement. And that really goes back to the whole idea of utility.

InfoWorld: What keeps you up at night?

Bell: I think the thing that keeps me up at night is just making sure that we do the right things to migrate through a tough economy and also to make sure we're doing the right thing for our customers, both in terms of making sure we're delivering, and in terms of the expectations that we set in making sure that we're listening with an open ear in terms of what their challenges are going forward.