Data storage systems have historically relied on proprietary tools and hardware, but now they are promising to catch up with the open systems that other IT technologies have had for decades.

Mike Zisman, general manager for storage software at IBM, says storage is finally changing. Take virtualisation, for example - IBM and its rivals are improving software to enable administrators to manage and control data on disparate systems as if it were a single resource.

Zisman says virtualisation was originally viewed as a way of cutting costs but it is now increasingly seen as a way of saving time and improving efficiency. "At first we thought that our number one proposition with virtualisation was better capacity utilisation to move bits from storage box to storage box and aggregate them together. As storage declines in cost, that's less of an issue."

Zisman says that rather than being sold as an independent add-on, virtualisation will find its home as part of a storage platform. "We want to create a platform of which virtualisation is just a small piece, with hierarchical systems management and autonomic (predictive and automatic troubleshooting) computing," he says. "What you end up with is a highly scalable, programmable storage controller. We're going to deliver this in 2003 on xSeries (Intel-based) servers."

Zisman says the main challenge for storage is to simplify storage management and introduce greater visibility to make life easier for IT administrators.

"Today, there's an increasingly tight binding between application and storage," he says. "To move storage today you have to turn off the application, physically copy the data and tell the application where you've moved the data. That's fraught with problems. The great promise is to improve the technology for storage administrators and application administrators, so that they become more productive."

A couple of years ago, many pundits argued that firms would achieve similar benefits by outsourcing storage management to third-parties, but Zisman says that the results have been disappointing. "It has certainly not panned out the way people thought it would for storage service providers," Zisman argues.

An obvious way to make storage administration easier is to improve interoperability between systems from different vendors. That does not just equate to swapping APIs and developing middleware translation layers - it also requires standards to let management software peer into systems from any vendor. "You have thousands of potential variables and you can't test all of them," says Zisman. "Hardware interoperability is (further) down the road but the only way forward is open standards."

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has promoted the Common Information Model (CIM) and Bluefin specifications to achieve basic compatibility, so management software can monitor multivendor systems. Zisman applauds the moves by rival vendor EMC on this front. "It is to EMC's credit that it is (endorsing such standards)," says Zisman. "Firms focused on multivendor storage management, such as IBM, EMC, BMC and Computer Associates, will be able to move quickly towards controlling each other's equipment."

Have your say: contact IT Week

ABOUT MIKE ZISMAN
Dr Michael Zisman is general manager of storage software for IBM's Storage Systems Group.

From 1995 to 2000, he worked for the IBM Software Group, leading its push into knowledge management.

In 1995 and 1996, Zisman was chief executive of Lotus.