Partnering for integration up the stack is essential, McCLure says, and we've seen the jockeying for position and heavy marketing that these storage vendors have invested in their alliances with VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. "Users we've surveyed are looking for that tight coupling--again, simplifies management, reduces risk of a single storage configuration mistake taking down a bunch of virtual machines. We've also seen them participate in the convergence game: Both NetApp and EMC have Cisco/VMware partnerships, though structured differently, and HDS has its own blade servers, so convergence does not necessarily leave these vendors out in the cold."
While the big vendors have been using favorable pricing and margins to win business, many are selling on the notion of "one throat to choke" (including Dell, HP and IBM) and pre-integrated stacks to reduce operating expense (such as Cisco and Oracle), says Gartner's Russell. "HP, through its Converged Infrastructure initiative, is also attempting to drive out redundancy and optimize services in the end-to-end build of systems, which includes storage. All vendors also point to advanced capabilities such as compression, deduplication, space efficient snapshots, thin provisioning, tiering, etc."
Gartner sees two major strategies "winning" in the market: 1.) the power play of a market share leader in storage, such as an EMC, using its broad sales force and company contacts to win major deployments and 2.) selling heavily on ease of installation and ongoing management and product efficiencies. NetApp is one vendor going the latter route, but others--including HP with its 3PAR acquisition and Dell with Compellent--also have gained traction in this way.
"In the end, the most important thing is to make a prioritized list of requirements and criteria and then map that to current technology from vendors to see what scores the best," says Russell. Despite the ongoing changes in the data center, consolidation and customers' interest in having "one throat to choke," Russell doesn't expect the major vendors to disappear. "Gartner polling and end user discussions strongly suggest that the majority of the storage buying public will continue to favor a best-of-breed purchasing methodology, which means that the current growth of the likes of EMC and NetApp do not look to change as a result of other data center initiatives or vendor packaging options."
See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Research: Data Center Convergence (subscription required).
