Nibble:- Good New Ideas in Storage Marketing?

It's as rare to find good new ideas in IT marketing as it is to find gold coins when you dig in the garden.

Most IT marketers in the past few decades have rarely stepped outside the smaller! faster! cheaper! school of thinking. Something new was added to these formulaic mantras in the last decade when vendors started advertising on the internet, but that too has become simply a me-too way of sales, which some do well, and most do badly.

The key to the innovation treasure chest, it seems, has been locked securely in the research and development department. If storage marketers have ever sought to come up with new good ways of enticing customers (as opposed to stupid gimicky ideas which insult your intelligence) these worthy new ideas have rarely come to light. Maybe it's just too hard for marketers - like solving the code to the cryptex in Dan Brown's novel the Da Vinci Code.

But despite it being a rare event, some lucky people do indeed find gold coins when digging in their garden. (Although most just find worms and get backache.)

Two new good ideas in storage marketing have appeared in these storage news pages in recent months. If you missed them, here they are again.

In the Backup Software market, Arkeia announced a new pricing scheme in which users can buy their enterprise backup software and pay a price that depends on the volume of data which they back up instead of the number or type of servers.

Now, some detractors might say here, that this isn't innovative, because web backup companies have been doing this all along. But this is the first time this ASP model has been applied to a piece of enterprise backup software which you own. Arkeia's pricing model enables fast growing organisations, which maybe don't need or can't afford the overpriced enterprise bloatware from Veritas or IBM today, to standardise on a product which does offer enterprise functions at a cost of ownership which is scalable to their needs.

In the Solid State Disk market, Texas Memory Systems announced a bunch of performance guarantees.

You'll have to see their web site for the details, but these guarantees mean, in effect, that if you tell them that you're expecting a given percentage speed up for your enterprise server application, and they agree, but you don't get it, then you'll get your money back. They also guarantee to be faster than any other storage system in the market, by the way.

I don't see many server makers who guarantee that their system will give you a named application speedup. They imply it. But in the server market the risk is always down to the user. Sometimes the new servers don't deliver the expected speedup, and other factors are blamed. The difference in the Texas Memory Systems' guarantee is that whatever your server environment, or applications, if they agree an overall speedup then you will get it or your money back. The company has decades of experience in speeding up applications for the government and has been in effect making these performance promises quietly to prospective customers for years. The reason they're going public now is that users says they are more likely to try solid state disk technology (as an alternative to more servers or CPUs) if there's a risk free way of trying it out.

These new marketing moves make it easier for users to dip their toes into the muddy waters of new technologies and new suppliers.

Enterprise systems are so complicated nowadays that it's difficult enough just keeping them running reliably. Most users don't have the spare time or resources to investigate new products and ideas which might make their systems run better or faster. And sometimes even the experts get it wrong by predicting improvements which fail to be achieved in practise. But the alternative:- the seemingly low risk, incremental upgrade route of just buying more of the same from current suppliers doesn't always fit the budget or doesn't always deliver the expected benefits either.

Some parts of the $70 billion / year storage market are getting very complicated with multiple technologies promising to be the answer to backup and archiving for example. They can't all be right, and they won't all last the full term. Vendors who can offer attractive switching services which migrate users data to a new platform with a credible guarantee that everything can be switched back if the new system doesn't deliver the promised benefits - will help new technology fly off the shelf faster. Technologies like iSCSI, which typically offer 5 times the performance of NAS when using the same network infrastructure, have been languishing in the small market swamp for years because vendors haven't been able to offer attractive marketing packages which tell users what the benefits really are, and take away the risk of new technology adoption.

Good New Ideas in Storage Marketing should be aimed at addressing the real anxieties and needs of users - like "what do I do if my online backup company goes bust?", or "what if I picked a server technology which looked good a few years ago (for example HP's Alpha) which has now been end-of -lifed by the original manufacturer and I don't have the budget to replace everything and start all over?"

I'll be writing more about this subject of new marketing ideas in storage later. If vendors think they have brilliant new ideas which also deserve a mention just copy me by email on the details.

See also:- MarketingViews, Record breaking storage

Serial Attached SCSI - Delivering Flexibility to the Data Center - article by LSI Logic and Maxtor

If you think you already know SAS because you know SATA and traditional SCSI then think again. Sometimes disruptive technologies wear an unassuming disguise. In fiction, Clark Kent, Frodo Baggins and Buffy Summers at first seem harmless, but we see them change into Superman, the Ring Bearer and the Slayer.

SAS too comes cloaked in plain garb - with a physical layer which looks a lot like SATA. But like the Incredible Hulk there are muscles rippling under that shirt - and you would be wrong to dismiss SAS so lightly. There's a lot more inside this interface than it says on the box as this informative article reveals.

...read the article, ...LSI Logic profile, ...Maxtor profile, Serial Attached SCSI