Storage Awareness: Minimize the economic impact of your business applications
Eight years ago my career collided with reality. By way of serendipity–following an unplanned career change–I discovered I had been living the last decade in a product development bubble. Two thousand and two was the year I had transitioned from building information management systems to managing a small storage industry analyst firm.
Up until 2002 I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that I thoroughly understood information management. After all, I had spent countless hours helping companies of all types implement systems to manage their digital information assets. I had no idea how little I understood until I began to learn more about storage infrastructure. All those years I had worked with other developers to build different types of business applications (e.g. enterprise content management systems and digital classrooms) with little regard for the applications’ impact on storage, mostly because I was not aware of their actual impact on storage. After all, storage was someone else’s problem we reasoned–a “black box” in which we stored our data. There was no reason for us to truly understand how it all worked as long as we had enough space for our applications and files, right? Our customers could simply install our applications and databases, fire them up and begin collecting, aggregating, managing, manipulating and saving gigabyte upon gigabyte of data to their hearts’ content…or so we thought.
Not so fast.
Silly me. I naively believed electronic information management was that simple. My fellow application engineers believed it too. Worse, many dozens of customers believed it was that simple.
I’m here now to tell you, it isn’t simple. There’s a cost–a very large cost–for storing, managing and protecting all the data generated by and with business applications. This is obvious to most storage and networking experts, but not so obvious to everyone else.
IT departments struggle with service levels, utilization rates, capacity and bandwidth limitations, provisioning, data protection challenges, floor space, labor, power and cooling costs, and more–all in support of our applications, and with flat or shrinking budgets. Today’s business applications make IT’s already difficult role damn near impossible.
So what?
So, your internal software development teams as well as those employed by your partners and application vendors, continue to create storage-hungry applications that eat through your IT budgets and business profits. The applications may be optimized for the servers within which they are installed, but I can tell you with 100% confidence that they are not optimized for the storage infrastructures required to support them.
Ignorance is no excuse.
Business applications generate and store an enormous amount of valuable information about the assets they manage–information that could be used by infrastructure vendors to more intelligently manage risk, provision resources, improve service levels, speed up disaster recovery processes, and minimize capital and operational expenses. Yet there exists no two-way collaborative communication between business applications and infrastructure. Application developers continue to focus on integration and interoperability between business-level applications at the expense of infrastructure applications. Consequently, storage vendors have no choice but to develop systems that attempt to predict the needs of business applications using sparse information gleaned or inferred from server, storage and network monitoring.
Business application vendors and developers remain largely unaware of storage innovations that, through integration and interaction, could improve the performance, reliability and efficiency of their applications. Data Mobility Group has had this conversation with hundreds of vendors and developers over the past eight years, and few show any interest in it. Some acknowledge the significant potential benefits of storage-awareness, but dismiss it out-of-hand simply because their customers/employers haven’t made enough of a fuss to motivate them to do anything about it. They do so at their customers’ and employers’ expense and at the expense of infrastructure vendors who must continue to rely on guesswork to support storage-ignorant applications.
How much do storage-ignorant business applications really cost? Take the cost of application licensing and support, then multiply it by 5, 10, 20 even 100 times or more and your estimate might be a bit closer to the true cost of ownership.
Applications designed to improve productivity and efficiency at the business level do so at the expense of productivity and efficiency within IT [by inadvertently shifting resource burdens from business to IT and multiplying the impact].
Where do we go from here?
Communication between business applications and IT applications is essential to reap the benefits of as-yet-untapped operational and capital efficiencies. Application developers and vendors must familiarize themselves with storage infrastructure and technologies. They must turn some of their attention and investments to integration and interaction down the technology stack and incorporate the programmatic hooks necessary for infrastructure vendors to cost-effectively manage and support business-critical applications, environments and information assets. The is a multi-billion dollar long-term market opportunity for value-added resellers, system integrators, vendor professional services and standards developing organizations.
In the meantime, customers must demand that next generation applications leverage innovations in storage and networking through better integration and interaction. The products of vendors and developers who are not on-board should be phased out over the next 2-5 years and replaced with storage-aware, storage-friendly systems as they become available.
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If you have questions about this article I invite you to contact us and arrange a FREE teleconference to discuss your concerns. We encourage you to invite members of your development team and IT staff, and representatives from your application vendors to join the conversation. Follow us on Twitter.
