Storage Networks - the storage space goes ASP

2000-05-11

The fog surrounding the Application Service Provider (ASP) market is starting to clear, as companies move away from the traditionalist view and start to demonstrate solutions that reveal the real potential of ASPs. One such company is Storage Networks, a company that is coming from "over there" to spread the word about Storage Service Provision "over here".

So - what is an ASP? At the moment there seem to be two prevailing views. ASPs are generally accepted to be concerned with delivering "applications over the wire" where an application can be any software package. A more specific model is that being touted by enterprise package vendors, such as Oracle, Siebel and SAP. For these companies, the ASP model is a means of marketing their products to the Small to Medium sized Enterprise customers that have been unable to afford such products as an outright purchase. With a rental/lease-based ASP model, smaller organisations can benefit from such applications and, of course, vendors can benefit from reaching a previously tapped customer segment. Taking the two views above, the ASP model is both an architecture and a business model.

With a bit of imagination however, ASPs can be much, much more. Rather than considering ASPs as applications that can be served, the model should cover the provision of the widest possible variety of services. Services can be arranged as a stack, with lower level communications, storage and processing services serving higher-level information, application and business services. This view has already been discussed from a theoretical standpoint in the IT-Director.com ASP feature. Now, real examples of its use are coming onstream, not as valiant attempts by niche technology players but through companies who are already reaping huge rewards from the model.

One such company is Storage Networks, which offers a managed raw storage service to other ASPs. Storage Networks has implemented fibre-based Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) in 36 US cities. Each MAN is used to connect a variety of types and configurations of storage equipment (for the technologists, Storage Networks is running both SAN and NAS equipment over the same fibre infrastructure). These configurations are then used to provide raw storage, backup/restore and data replication services to Storage Networks' customers who pay a fixed monthly fee per Gigabyte available. The company is launching a service next week in the UK, and intends to be in ten European cities by the end of the year.

All is not roses in the storage camp, not least due to the fact that the different storage vendors have yet to standardise on a single mechanism for managing storage. Storage Networks' customers can monitor their own virtual store through a read-only interface and can request repartitioning or increased bandwidth. All such requests are funnelled back to a management centre where updates are made using the proprietary software of each vendor. Against this backdrop, the other issue faced by companies such as Storage Networks is the accelerating requirement for storage. The company is finding out that despite the continued improvements in disk sizes and data rates, storage supply is only just keeping up with demand.

There are clearly still some problems to be over come in the storage market, but let us not be distracted from the fact that the underlying trend is towards provision of storage as a service. Such facilities go way beyond the 10Mb of disk space currently allocated by ISPs, often with little or no guarantees of service levels. What we are talking about here is the evolution of IT towards enterprise scale, performant, available facilities that are delivered as a utility rather than in a crate. Faced with the increasing cost and complexity of technology, the service provision model is one that few organisations will be able to avoid forever.

(First published 11 May 2000)