Storage Pals

Posted 1/01/2002

Storage Pals
Network, Computing Companies Find Joys of Partnering

By Peter Lambert

Demand for business information protection has been growing exponentially, even before the heightened awareness of security issues resulting from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Corporations simply are gathering and analyzing more information than ever before.

Storing, protecting and otherwise managing data about customers, inventories, transactions and other business critical information have become heavy lifting propositions for financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and many other lines of business.

What better application than storage management to fill the servers being built by computer makers and the high-speed pipes being built by network service providers? A host of partnerships has been created to that end.

In late October, for example, high-speed business connectivity and information management service provider GiantLoop Network Inc. announced an agreement with Compaq Computer to extend the availability and performance benefits of storage area networks (SANs) using Compaq's Data Replication Manager (DRM) over GiantLoop's all-optical metropolitan area networks (MANs).

As part of the agreement, GiantLoop and Compaq will collaborate on sales, marketing, design and deployment of "extended-distance optical storage networking services," but only as complementary providers, rather than as co-channels with a revenue split.

In addition, Cable & Wireless plc's hosting, content delivery and Internet acceleration subsidiary Digital Island extended its own technology alliance with Compaq, standardizing on Compaq StorageWorks Network Attached Storage (NAS) as the storage platform for Digital Island's 2Deliver Web services at the edge of the Internet.

Digital Island described its selection of the Compaq storage solution as part of an overall effort to extend managed storage offerings throughout its services portfolio.

A few weeks later, TelefÛnica Data, a subsidiary of TelefÛnica S.A., announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co. through which the companies will market and promote TelefÛnica Managed Infrastructure Data Services solutions.

Those solutions are supported by HP OpenView enterprise management solutions, HP storage and HP hardware platforms. In response to what the companies called "unprecedented customer demand for safeguarding data," they will promote data recovery, shared storage and managed services through TelefÛnica Data's KeyCenter, located in Miami.

"We are very partner focused -- intent on enabling our service provider partners to do well and climb up the value chain in the services they offer," says Steve Hanney, worldwide director of HP's Service Provider Program, launched last May. "I believe the merger with Compaq will help each company leverage what is already a very consistent approach and strategy. One vision of teaming for success by enabling the next generation of service providers."

From the network operator's point of view, storage can be a natural first step into that next generation. "Storage traffic is steering the ship right now, because it's such a bandwidth hog," says Joe Oltsick, vice president of marketing and strategy for GiantLoop. "It used to be that, when Compaq went in to sell its storage hardware and data replication software, it sort of left the customer to go find it's own wide-area network provider and make it work for storage-to-storage connectivity over long distances. Now Compaq can bring us in and show how our managed Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet transport is complementary to its data replication offering."

Nothing But Net

Says Hanney, "with growing optical capacity and ongoing generation of more and more web-based content, "for all major service providers, storage could account for 30 to 40 percent of any opportunity" with a business customer.

But storage constitutes only one piece of the evolving picture for infrastructure services partners. For example, HP is determined to use its hardware and software products to enable its network service provider (NSP) partners to add management service provider (MSP) and application infrastructure provider (AIP) capabilities to already established private data transport and Internet access services.

Telefonica, Qwest Communications International Inc. and other HP partners can use HP's OpenView software to offer remote management of enterprise networks behind the firewall and management of IT infrastructure outsourced to NSP data centers.

These outsourcers also can use HP Surestore hardware to offer high-end storage services.

Further, Telefonica plans to use HP's Netaction Java-based web services, server middleware and operating systems software to offer development and hosting environments to independent software vendors (ISVs) that can use the combined Telefonica and HP infrastructure services to build and manage business applications.

Still, GiantLoop's Oltsick says providing transport for storage represents a substantial business. If about 5 percent of U.S. businesses are connected directly to optical metro networks like GiantLoop's, "that 5 percent happens to be where the Fortune 500 live."

It is a market segment that has lots of data to protect and that has evolved to multi-data-center architectures consolidating operations halfway between centralized and distributed, he says.

In the longer term, Oltsick expects storage will prove a launchpad for additional service opportunities.

"The enterprise wants to decrease the complexity of the external network and integrate that into their IT operations, rather than leaving it a separate piece-part that doesn't really fit," he says. "As storage gets us wins to build entire networks for key customers, those businesses will look to us over time to help them apply those very fast metro networks as they consolidate other internal IT functions."

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