How ecommerce has repainted the storage landscape

Ecommerce is adding to the storage needs of Internet companies and traditional businesses alike - and storage vendors are doing their best to capitalise on this increase in demand.

For example, EMC launched its 'E-proven' initiative in October last year, which claims to identify best practice in enterprise storage for Internet-based businesses - based, of course, on EMC technology. It boasts clients such as PSINet, Barnesandnoble.com and Excite@Home.

Sun Microsystems is also after a share of the ecommerce market. In December it launched a services package specifically aimed at supporting companies' ecommerce strategies.

But these moves are not simply about clever marketing. Ecommerce really is making people think about storage in a different way.

Robin Bloor, founder and CEO of Bloor Research, said: "The dot-com companies have the problems that are worth solving. For example, they will come to the vendor and say: 'Help, I have one million people coming to the site every day and I can't manage all the log files.' The vendor will put their best people on the project to solve the problems."

Paul Gostick, marketing manager at Sun Professional Services, believes companies face unique issues when they embark on ecommerce: he also identified log files as a particular problem, as well as managing the data collected by CRM (customer relationship management) applications.

"Companies see explosive growth in the volume of data they have to manage and it has to be accessible 24 by seven," he said. "So they need secure, scaleable and reliable back-up that can be done without taking the Web site down."

According to EMC, Excite@Home has bought 45TB of data storage over the last two years - which it said is more than a traditional major bank would consume in five to ten years.

The surge in the demand for ecommerce-driven storage will slow down though - but the vendors have an answer for that too. They're counting on IT directors looking beyond the simple act of throwing extra capacity at new ecommerce projects. Jason Rabbetts, commercial director at storage consultancy, Source Enterprise Consulting, believes IT directors are beginning to re-engineer their existing IT infrastructures in an attempt to reduce the cost of storage management.

"Of 100 top companies in the UK, 95 per cent are considering their storage management strategy. This time last year that figure would have only been 30 per cent. People are now looking at storage policies in a way they never had before. Demand for ecommerce has created projects driven by business intelligence and this is making storage a much higher priority for the IT director," Rabbetts argued.

Conversely, Claus Egge, research manager at IDC, claimed that there are still too many companies which don't consider their data storage requirements when embarking on an ecommerce project. "A lot of companies panic and want to do ecommerce immediately, so they bolt an ecommerce application onto their legacy systems which will then have to replicate the data, making management more difficult and the costs far higher."

A recent survey of IT managers around the world carried out by US research house FIND/SVP confirmed this. It found that 66 per cent of companies have not been able to integrate their Internet data with their traditional business data. As a result, 83 per cent are looking at ways they can consolidate the management of their data across the different platforms.

Egge believes that this phase of consolidation is almost certainly going to involve Storage Area Networks (SANs). The concept of storage area networking has been bandied around for a couple of years now, but Europe in particular has seen few genuine roll-outs. However, analysts agree that SANs will come of age this year. Source Consulting's Rabbetts said: "SANs will deliver on the hype in 2000."

Ecommerce may not be the over-riding reason companies turn to SANs - but it will prove to be a major contributory factor as IT directors are forced to think about storage strategy, not simply capacity. And that should keep the vendors happy, even after the ecommerce goldrush has died down.