Storage software has been a minnow, but that is about to change, Angus Kidman reports.

Published in AustralianIT, March 18 2002

IN the storage market, storage management software is definitely a minnow. According to analyst IDC, of the $1804 million spent on storage technologies in Australia and New Zealand in 2001, just 10 per cent, or about $180 million, went on software.

However, it's a minnow moving at speed. IDC estimates the regional market for storage management software could triple in the next five years.

As many hardware suppliers bundle their software at little cost, such figures may underestimate the demand for storage management software systems.

The market remains competitive, with storage giants EMC, IBM and HP slugging it out against software specialists CA, Veritas and Legato.

Storage management software covers a range of activities, from fairly straightforward back-up packages to complex virtualisation systems that allow multiple systems to be viewed as a single storage unit.

A key concern for many users is getting a unified view of disparate systems.

"As people are buying new technology, they still have legacy systems and they need to be able to view and manage that data," Network Appliance regional director Harry Christian says.

Software can help secure better ROI from storage investments, and track use for billing to individual departments. "I think there's a growing awareness that just putting in a storage solution doesn't solve all the problems," says Greg Bowden, national business manager for systems integrator Dimension Data.

But it does play a role in business continuity.

"Storage management also facilitates the underlying technology required for high-availability business systems and applications, allowing businesses to keep operating in the advent of failures," technical architect at Veritas Sal Fernando says.

How will such software evolve in the future? Large vendors such as IBM and CA are promoting notions such as autonomic, or neural, network systems, which manage storage more intelligently and proactively. In the shorter term, managers would like more storage systems visible from a single management console.

"Clients tend to show a preference for a storage management solution if one of their current management applications has a module that already covers storage management," senior solutions architect at systems integrator Alphawest Peter Marklew says.

"Storage management software will get broader in its capabilities -- improving in areas such as billing and multi-vendor capability," Dimension Data's Bowden says.

Computer Associates senior consultant Andrew Antal identifies three key growth: better understanding of underlying hardware; better tracking of current and anticipated data levels; and improved interaction with other applications to determine those numbers.