Small storage vendors, hold on to that niche

“StorageNetworks has solutions to help you manage your storage and data like a business — with improved control, service, and bottom line results. … Description: A storage service provider offering remote data storage services on a pay-as-you-go basis.”

I ran into this while doing an unrelated search on networked storage, and almost without thinking, clicked on that link that now opens only a somewhat somber page describing the closing activities at StorageNetworks.

But that blurb, a reminder of a more cheerful time for the company, is still in the Google database. In a few days it will probably disappear, and I doubt that we will see the words “remote data storage services” used again in that context.

The idea of offering storage space across the wires had some appeal (after all, several companies and analysts jumped on that wagon) but unfortunately, it never became a profitable business model.

Other companies in the same sector chose to stick to perhaps less glamorous but more rewarding business activities. For example, Arsenal Digital Solutions did quite well offering customers assistance for activities such as data migrations, data center relocations, and remote monitoring of backup and restore.

In fact, recently Gartner recognized Arsenal as a major niche player in a “quadrant” that listed prominent storage service companies.

In the current cutthroat storage market, finding the right niche is probably the best recipe for survival for a small vendor because it opens a sheltered haven where its business can prosper safely away from the industry heavyweight competition.

It’s better still if that niche complements popular products from mainstream vendors. A perfect example of that is the RamSan line of cache systems from Texas Memory Systems.

As the name suggests, those appliances make SANs more responsive by inserting a large memory cache between application servers and storage devices.

Frequently referenced data is kept in the cache memory, which is several orders of magnitude faster than storage; hence, performance can improve significantly, although the mileage can vary depending on the cache size and the application.

The latest model, the RamSan 330, which began shipping at the end of July, offers as many as eight fast Fibre Channel ports, a maximum of 64GB of memory, and redundant, hot swappable components. In case of power interruptions, a set of batteries keeps the system running while the cache content is automatically saved to fast internal disk drives.

Wondering why RamSan is a perfect “niche product”? Well, most SANs have only one or two gigabytes of cache, a space that a battery of busy servers can fill up quickly.

Add to the picture entry-level and mid-tier SAN, which should start selling like hot cakes as soon as we get off this economic slump, which should be anytime now.

Strike three: SAN vendors are not interested in adding another layer of complexity and cost that could make their products less competitive, so they won’t deliver larger cache anytime soon.

In essence, customers who have invested some real dollars in their SAN will gladly invest more money to get the performance that they need. Granted, not all SAN owners will rush to buy a cache, but it’s a niche market, after all.