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By Jon Toigo, Toigo Partners International

Consumers need to drive vendors to deliver what they really need, and not what the vendors want to sell them. They need to break with the old ways of architecting storage infrastructure and of purchasing the wrong gear to store their bits: Deploying a "SAN" populated with lots of stovepipe arrays and fabric switches that deliver less than 15% of optimal efficiency per port is a waste of money that bodes ill for companies in the areas of compliance, continuity, and green IT. IT planners, instead, need to make management a priority: Settle on a resource management solution or vision, and then purchase only gear that can be managed under the chosen management approach. That might cajole vendors to pursue right-headed designs that deliver real business value. And, of course, IT needs to manage data better — much better — than it does today. In fact, this effort requires greater cooperation between business management and IT. There are no short cuts and no silver bullets.

The salad days of throwing more and more inappropriate brand name hardware at every problem must end. We need to get real about the costs of IT designs that fail to address root causes of current inefficiency: our failure to manage storage infrastructure efficiently and our failure to manage data across infrastructure intelligently.

Let's be clear. What we call a SAN today isn't a storage area network at all. There is no "network" involved, just a low-level interconnect providing a direct attached storage method that uses a physical layer switch to make and break server-storage interconnects at high speed. Unless you want to leverage some very proprietary protocols offered by Brocade or Cisco Systems on their switches (and that work only on their switches) for doing some management functions in-band, you need a true network interconnect (IP, for example) to every device in the fabric to perform even the simplest management tasks (discovery, for example). In effect, for every server or storage device you connect in the SAN, you need at least two Fibre Channel cables (for redundancy) and two IP connections (for management) to make it work at all well. This is equal parts kluge and cable mess.