Your Data is Your Business

Is storage hot? Ask all the global IT execs moving there.

Some to start-ups: Enrico Pesatori, Compaq’s former chief of enterprise

products and services; HP’s former systems and sales head, Dick Watts. Some to

established players: Oracle’s former No. 2, Gary Bloom, became CEO of storage

software leader Veritas, a Top 10 software company that has also drawn over a

Goldman Sachs CTO and an Oracle senior V-P (as CMO).

Storage is big for a cash-strapped industry with vanishing

margins. While infotech revenues have declined, Veritas has grown 24%. Its CEO

calls it "the value shift in storage from hardware to software". Its

partners include Compaq, Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Sun and Cisco. That impressive

list has a good reason: storage could be a $100-billion industry in 2005, and,

with security, it was the infotech area that grew, post-September 11.

One driver has been server consolidation for security and

manageability, coupled with the need for distributed caching for better user

response in globally-distributed service companies. But post 9.11, the really

big area is disaster recovery, and business continuity.

IDC expects the Asia-Pacific disaster recovery market to grow

from $500 million last year to over $1.3 billion by 2006. That’s mostly in

Australia, Korea and Singapore. India and China are "emerging"

markets...

...which means there’s been muted activity in the storage

arena in India, barring the odd large enterprise and FSI (financial services)

organization. Nine of ten large enterprises continue to use direct-attached

storage, a few have started deploying networked-attach devices, and SANs are

rare indeed. A big reason is poor wide-area connectivity, which does not lend

itself to centralized, consolidated storage at a countrywide level.

But there’s also little focus on data as business-critical,

except in the FSI sector. In a series of Dataquest CIO forums on storage, we

found no active disaster management and recovery program in most cases, even in

large enterprises. The only investment in the area was often for backup systems,

seen as an adequate "business continuity" effort. But those who had

experienced failures often found that while they had backups in place, they

could not recover data. For one reason or another.

Cost is a dampener, especially in a tough year. As IDC puts it,

"organizations view recovery as an essentially preventive solution rather

than a tangible IT expenditure with a clear return on investment"…while

companies are hampered by the it-won’t-happen-here blinder. Trouble is, it

probably will happen here. Some event that takes away your data. That’s when

the survivors will stand out: those businesses with a data management and

business continuity plan in place, who had tested it out.

pkr@cmil.com