Market Research

Infrastructure Wars: The Battle Brewing in the Storage Industry

IT execs have three choices: Do Nothing: Don’t implement any coherent infrastructure strategy and allow application heads to do whatever they want (Bespoke Model). If you’re an organization that has excess cash to burn and is not interested in improving efficiencies or aligning IT infrastructure with business requirements this is a perfectly viable strategy for you. Standardize: Implement chargebacks and offer application owners a limited set of standardized, menu-based infrastructure services (Shared Storage Services Model) that are managed, evolved and best-of-breed. This strategy will piss lots of people off within the organization but you will end up with lower costs and a far better return on infrastructure assets. Compromise: Use a hybrid approach that defaults to a Storage Services Model but selectively integrates function into the application stack when warranted based on a clear business case (Hybrid Model).

"There is a competitive battle brewing in the on-premise storage business and it’s not between EMC/NetApp or EMC/IBM. It’s stemming from a move by independent software vendors specifically Microsoft and Oracle, to bundle more storage function into their application stacks, push storage function closer to the host and commoditize the storage hardware layer. The move to integrate storage function into the application stack is real and in some cases can add substantial value to organizations. But there is a price to pay and IT executives need to understand the strategies and implications for long term success. Underpinning these trends is Google’s decade long march toward simplification and cloud services; which is not only driving software vendors like Microsoft crazy; it’s also causing them to drive down perceived costs wherever possible and grab as much value in their stacks as they can."