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There's no doubt that storage has gained the mindshare of ICT decision buyers with more and more foregoing throwing a few more terabytes of storage at the problem. Maximising a possible solution at storage proof of concept centres is now de rigueur. Anthony J Muzik explores the options in this growing area of storage.

Casanova was able to make lovers and enemies in any language it would seem, and in his retirement he spent the last years of his life as a librarian, so is information storage and retrieval sexy? Well it depends on who you talk to. But it appears most IT managers and decision makers want to test before they buy.

Over the past eighteen months, off the shelf, wall to wall and pick and choose ad hoc options have given those clients who want to get a grip on storage a headache. There are two kinds of necessary storage, email and everything else with compliance becoming imperative.

Solution centres of all types have sprung up to deal with part of the movement driven by Records Management Standard (AS ISO154890 and TRIM and other legislation (currently under review) requiring publicly listed companies and public organisations to store their data in a form that is easily accessed, say in the year 2054.

The buzz words around the storage industry today are virtualisation, information lifecycle management (ILM), and automated provisioning, to name a few. These hot technology trends will now develop more quickly as a result of normalising the interfaces of the devices that make up these solutions for disaster recovery or business continuity and the like. To prove that organisations are getting a storage system that will work, proof of concept (PoC) centres are becoming more prevalent. Investorword.com defines PoC as "evidence that demonstrates that a business model or idea is feasible".

Voice&Data asked EMC Product Marketing Manager, Mark Heers about virtualisation and proof of concept.

"Virtualisation and proof of concept are not the same thing, PoC is something that our customers require more and more. I mean it's one thing to demonstrate on a whiteboard or with a presentation, but a lot of people want to see what they're implementing in practice, so the EMC Solution Centre can show a wide variety of likely application requirements. We have had over 120 virtualisation visits in this centre by clients wanting solutions to storage."

As for market challenges and trends, Voice&Data spoke to Foad Fadaghi, Senior Analyst from Frost & Sullivan, who recently contributed to a report on the enterprise content management (ECM) market for Asia Pacific, which was estimated to be $87.2 million for 2003, having grown by 23% over 2002.

"Australian enterprises have the view that it is very difficult to integrate workflow, document management and BPM with existing enterprise applications. The major vendors are struggling to demonstrate ROI models to prospective customers. As a result, a large number of vendors are developing a proof of concept to show new clients.

There has been a very high degree of consolidation in the ECM industry and this shake-out has led enterprises to adopt a 'wait-and-watch' policy.

There is an increasing trend by enterprises to incorporate emails as a critical document in the organisational workflow. It remains to be seen, however, whether it could be viewed as a standalone module or integrated with other document management modules.

The push by the major vendors to modularise solutions has been successful in making enterprises view ECM solutions as easy to deploy, demonstrating a higher return on investment (ROI) and faster implementation times. This in turn has been instrumental in enterprises perceiving ECM as a lower risk solution as compared to other enterprise applications like CRM and ERP.

The need to improve content and records management, which has been predominantly associated with public sector organisations, is also becoming an important role in private enterprises as well. Governments across Asia-Pacific are now more than ever committed to delivering online services in the government-to-citizen (G2C) space. Also, there is a surge in integrating information management across the government-to-government (G2G) and government-to-business (G2B) space.

What about the Australian customer and the way Australians notoriously embrace and devour technology? From the quickest adoption of VHS in the world to the stump jump plough and scientific farming breakthroughs even before federation! Small country, big ideas.

Computer Associates' Graham Payne said, "It's not as though they (Australians) are hard to please, they are very knowledgeable, they have done their homework, they are well aware of the industry, and they are not easily convinced without seeing things in action. When they're looking for solutions they look for a combination of technologies seamlessly working together.

"Which is why we show our technology working in our solutions centre, things like how do you recover an email application, what is best practice around storage management, or I'm moving towards my first SAN what should I do and government compliance is driving this trend."

Data#3 and its business partner IBM have set up the Total Storage Solution Centre (TSSC) in Australia to help businesses address the increased complexity in implementing and managing storage networks. TSSC is a purpose-built facility for designing, testing, evaluating and installing customised storage solutions. By allowing businesses to develop a proof of concept for their chosen storage solution, or evaluate new technologies, prior to purchase, the TSSC lowers the risks for business of investing in storage solutions. It enables faster deployment of solutions and minimises integration costs, thereby reducing the total cost of storage solution ownership.

The TSSC concept has already proved successful with 140 established clients worldwide. Based on the experiences and statistics of customers utilising the existing centres, around 80% of organisations that use a TSSC facility to develop a PoC will ultimately implement that chosen storage solution.

IBM and Data#3 identified a market opportunity in Australia for a centre that could provide businesses with a one-stop-shop for storage solutions including hardware, software and services. A critical element of the centre is to provide real-time storage configuration testing and tuning that demonstrates to customers how to network storage before they make a significant investment in a new system.

"How to manage storage infrastructure has become a key issue for our clients' IT departments. IBM's storage software family is about simplifying that infrastructure and helping clients deal with the high cost and complexity of data management. It effectively offers customers a dramatic new way to visualise and ultimately virtualise their entire corporate information assets while improving storage capacity utilisation, administrator productivity, and application availability. A recent customer study by IBM suggested businesses with mid-size to large SANs could save, on average, more than half a million dollars in the first year through improved disk utilisation and administrator productivity, as well as several million dollars in lost storage-related opportunity costs by improving application availability," said Brian Hamel, Vice President, Asia Pacific, IBM Storage.

EMC, Brocade, Computer Associates, Data#3 and Network Appliance have all populated Sydney's Lower North Shore with either solution centres or solutions that work out of the box. A tailored storage solution developed with the resources of a solution centre involves the following steps:

• Detailing business requirements;
• Reviewing the latest storage techniques and technologies;
• Designing a customised solution;
• Building a prototype and testing the solution utilising the PoC facilities;
• Deploying the proven solution at a customer site.

EMC and Computer Associates are similar to Data#3 in that they feature purpose-built PoC facilities showcasing their products and expertise where clients can brainstorm, like the Beatles locked in the Abbey Road studios. Most people surveyed by Voice&Data said they tend to use email as their default file and archive and this will only grow as a way of establishing an accurate 'paper trail' for internal and external communications. Think of good corporate governance and detailed record keeping - who said what and when?

Using automated policy management software, the EMC Express Solution for E-Mail helps organisations with hundreds to several thousands of email users to consolidate and manage years of email messages on a single networked storage system. By cost-effectively expanding mailbox limits, end-user productivity improves while Microsoft Exchange Server storage total cost of ownership is reduced by up to 30%.

Additionally, EMC hopes to offer customers the opportunity to observe up-and-running solutions at Microsoft Technical Centres (MTCs), beginning in late 2004. The program will enable customers and partners to work with live demos and scope out hardware and software configurations at six locations in North America and Europe.

"The EMC Express Solution for E-mail helps mid-sized organisations maximise the benefits of Microsoft Exchange Server by enabling the highest levels of availability and protection," said Kim Akers, senior director, Exchange Server Marketing. "Mid-sized organisations with budget limitations can now purchase ready-made solutions from EMC and their partners with built-in backup and recovery as well as a limitless mailbox."

Brocade's partners in Australia and NZ all have proof-of-concept data centres and Hewlett-Packard's Australian data centre is purpose built for storage proof-of-concept use throughout Asia-Pacific. Hitachi and StorageTek also maintain PoC labs in Australia for these purposes.

Now get ready for the travelling roadshow, as Brocade has a mobile SAN in Australia, which can be used at the customer's site to demonstrate the product and show PoC. Brocade has also conducted research on storage best practices for further use in PoC to potential clients.

Regulatory and compliance guidelines such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Patriot Act, and The Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999 issued to US enterprises will have a big impact on driving enterprises to manage their content better. This will also affect foreign enterprises that conduct business with their US and EU counterparts and is likely to permeate all enterprises in Asia-Pacific. Having an effective ECM solution in place will also make it easier to conform to new regulations, likely to be issued in the near future.

After a string of corporate scandals such as Enron, HIH and OneTel, enterprises have become increasingly aware of stringent requirements to adhere to transparency and corporate governance guidelines. This is likely to remain an important driver for the next two years. The new Compliance Standard (Australia) will further strengthen the move from voluntary codes of best practice to mandatory requirements.

The increasing use of portals by enterprises to streamline business processes with their suppliers, partners and customers has led to faster adoption of ECM solutions as this avoids duplication of data and standardises workflow. Enterprises have turned their focus towards processes like business activity monitoring (BAM), which ECM vendors have inculcated in their suite of products.

Prices of storage media consistently dropping year on year, as well as improvements in technology in storage area networks (SAN), has led enterprises to use more storage features to enhance credibility of ECM solutions.

Last thought, do I have to store my SPAM as well?

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