Single Vs. Multiple Vendor Approaches

A while back, I commented on the growing disparity I was seeing to these different approaches to storage in larger customer environments.

Not surprisingly, I was taken to task by many over my observations.  "Of course", they'd offer, "what else would you expect a large vendor to say?"

Well, I'm signing up for another round of punishment.

Why?  It's getting even clearer to me with each passing week.

A Bit Of Background

When it comes to buying storage (or any infrastructure technology, for that matter), there seem to be two camps:

• Best-of-breed (i.e. multivendor): -- buy what's best, get the best price, keep all the vendors on their toes, etc. etc.
• Single vendor: primarily use one vendor's offerings, and hold them accountable for the outcome.

The feelings people have around these different approaches often transcends cold logic, and can even become quite emotional (more on this later).

All I Know Is What I See

I won't bore you with a set of logical arguments on this one.  I will, however, share with you how I'm coming to my own views on this topic.

Right down the street from my office is EMC's Executive Briefing Center (EBC).  On a good day, we'll get anywhere from 7 to 15 customer organizations coming in for a briefing.

To this day, it still amazes me that people will fly out to see us and spend a day or two going through an incredibly thorough set of topics -- it's a wonderful thing, and I am continually thankful to our customers and partners who make this significant investment in time, over and over again.

Depending on my schedule, I'll get to meet with several of them in a given day, often several times a week.

That back-to-back perspective makes the contrast in approaches very clear, which is what I want to share.

Look at it from my perspective, for just a moment:

Briefing Room #11

Large manufacturing company.  Storage is largely out of control.  Costs are escalating, utilization is poor, business units are complaining, as is the CFO and CIO.  Backups are miserable.  No clear archiving strategy in place.

Sure, all the techies in the room are interested in learning about all the new stuff (as well as debating competitive points), but the more senior people in the room have a very different agenda -- how do we get this stuff under control?

Guess which approach they're using?  Primary single vendor, or multi-vendor?

Briefing Room #7

Big European telco.  Yes, storage capacites are growing, but there's no panic in the room.  They've got the tools and the processes to understand where the growth is coming from, and how to manage it.

They're really interested in the new technologies that can save costs (e.g. dedupe, big drives, new approaches to archiving) to complement what they're already doing.  We end up talking about specific use cases in their environment, and specific plans for deployment.

We also get into a discussion around specific new business areas they're getting into, and how EMC might help.

Guess which approach they're using?  Primary single vendor, or multi-vendor?

Briefing Room #5

Financial service company, in the middle of an aquisition period.  Lots of new applications, platform, processes and technologies.  One of the primary rationales for acquistion was IT cost takeout.

They're on a mission to standardize as much as possible, as quickly as possible -- just to get to the metrics for the acquisition strategy.

Guess which approach they prefer?  Primary single vendor, or multi-vendor?

Briefing Room #8

Large regional retailer with different chains.  IT can be charitably described as "federated", which means that every business unit sort of does what they want to most of the time.

Business is slow, costs need to be taken out, and fast.  Centralized and consolidated IT is becoming very important to everyone all of the sudden.  Budget authority has recently shifted to the centralized group.

Guess which approach they prefer?

Briefing Room #10

Large energy company.  Oil is getting harder to find.  All of the sudden, getting the right information to the right place at the right time becomes an essential component of their business strategy.

How do we tag and classify all of our information, and get it in front of the key knowledge workers that drive the critical business decisions?

Guess which approach they prefer?

Briefing Room #3

US-based company, I don't want to say which industry. 

Storage team is here for a set of product updates.  Most of the day is spent on the finer points of things like remote replication, HA design, cache architecture, new storage media, security features, serviceability, etc.

Long, thoughtful debates on how EMC's approach compares to vendor X and vendor Y and vendor Z.

Neat stuff, to be sure.  But I've read earlier this week that their company continues to struggle to find growth and margin opportunities in a very challenging marketplace. 

And the sales team tells me that this particular IT group is under a lot of pressure to lower costs, improve service levels, get utilization up, and be more responsive to the business.

There are a lot of people in the room, but we're not talking about any of that.  We're having technology debates.  And I keep wondering -- how important is this to their business strategy?

Guess which approach they prefer?

I'm not making this up.  This is a composite of an average week for me in EMC's EBC. 

Now, if you were me, what side of this discussion would you be espousing?

Now, Why Is This Such An Emotional Topic, And Not A Business Decision?

Two reasons, one on each side of the table.

First (and most obviously) are vendor behaviors.  Not only do certain vendors occasionally tend to exploit their dominant status in an organization in a way that might not be in the customer's best interests, but many IT people have been on the wrong end of a vendor situation where they've felt trapped, and vowed "never, ever again".

Fair enough.  That's reality, isn't it?

But, on the other side of the table, I've met more than a few people who define their value proposition in the IT organization as "vendor management" in one aspect or another, e.g. running RFPs, getting the best price, playing them off against each other, keeping them honest, and so on.

Still others in the organization have to deal with the inevitable complexity that results from a multi-vendor strategy, and make everything work.  Take everything you want to do, and increase the friction coefficient by 2x, 3x or more.

So here's the emotional question: are these roles essential value-added roles, or just needless overhead?

And, based on my observations, I see both out there.  But the results seem to be very, very different.

A Bit Of History

Many years ago, I had a friend who had found a very lucrative business doing email gateway integration.  At that time in the industry, corporations often had multiple email domains, and -- of course -- none of them worked together as well as they could have.

I remember him telling me "these people are doing it to themselves". 

His customers felt that they couldn't trust any single vendor, couldn't get the best price / features / support / etc. without having multiple email environments around.

As a result, he was making a fortune integrating around this "optimal strategy".  Of course, the market wised up, went single-vendor for email, and he's probably found something else to do with his time these days.

But is it really so different?  After all, at a certain level, email is email is email.  Find a vendor you trust, and get on with it.

I'm Not Going To Win This Debate

... so I'm not even going to try.  Everyone in IT has to go through their own journey on this topic.

But, based on my experience, I can figure out in the first 5 minutes of a customer meeting which approach they've adopted.

And they don't even have to tell me.

[update: I found out later today that both Dave Raffo and Forrester wrote on pretty much the same subject today.  I guess it's something to do with the weather, or the economy, or something like that ;-)]

Comments

[the storage anarchist]

Seems that you and Dave Raffo are on the same wavelength today:

http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/04/25/primary-storage-still-means-one-vendor/

[mgbrit]

Yes, we've heard this many many times over the last 10 years. It absolutely makes sense not to mix your vendors if you're looking to simplify your business operations and improve utilization.

I would take this argument further and consider that simplifying across the app-OS-server-storage stack is also significant.

Why more companies don't buy their storage directly from their server vendors always surprises me.

[Chuck Hollis]

Why don't more people buy storage from their server vendors?

For probably the same reason they don't buy networks, databases and applications from their server vendors: they're usually not very good at it!

But you knew that, didn't you?

[mgbrit]

I'm not sure if I agree with your comment, Chuck.

Quite a few customers must think they are good at it, which is why IBM, HP and Dell are second, third and fourth in sales, with pure plays NetApps and HDS behind them. Yes, obviously EMC still maintains #1.

Customers are increasingly buying Procurve from HP, DB2 from IBM and as for applications, both HP and IBM have dozens to sell - and they do!

[Chuck Hollis]

So, if you want to go a few rounds on this, I'm up for it.

If you study the market share numbers for any amount of time, you'll notice that the vast majority of the server vendor's storage numbers are smaller arrays sold at the same time that servers are sold, usually to smaller organizations.

Conversely, when the organization is larger, or the applications are larger, the strong preference is towards storage specialists.

That's for storage. If you'd like to get into the market share numbers for databases, applications, etc. -- I'm sure I can dig those up, but we both know what I'd find, don't we?

Bottom line: server vendors seem to do best at servers, and little else.

[tarheel]

Unfortunately, smart engineers don’t make the decision because they would not just focus on capital acquisition like executive management does they would focus on TCO. We have several server vendors who constantly try to package the storage with the servers and propose the packages to management as a way to save capital but they refuse to talk about the TCO of the package they propose and its complicating effects on the storage environment. That is how we have ended up with so many vendor products on the floor. As I like to say, the server vendors sell their inferior storage to upper management because they cannot sell it to the technical guys.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Bobby -- good to hear from you.

You're right, an awful lot of storage gets sold that way -- more than most people think.

For example, if you look at the market share rankings, you'll notice that IBM, HP, Sun and a few other server vendors are usually ahead of a specialist like NetApp or HDS.

And you say to yourself "why is this?" because you *know* these server vendors aren't really committed to storage R+D, specialization, etc.

I mean, who in their right mind would buy HP storage to go with their IBM servers, or IBM storage to go with their Sun?

If anything, "strongly encouraging" customers to buy what's essentially proprietary storage to go with their servers is one of the best lock-ins left to the server vendors. If you have their storage, you're far less likely to go looking for a different flavor of server, right?

Thanks for writing!

[Joerg Hallbauer]

Chuck,

I think that block storage virtualization might be the sea change when it comes to this topic. I've bloged on this recently (http://joergsstorageblog.blogspot.com) so I won't repeat it all here, but I think that BSV might allow a company to get the best of both worlds. You can buy your storage arrays from whoever is cheapest per GB at the time without paying the "multi-vendor penalty".

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for what most folks refer to as “file virtualization”. Global name spaces allow us to move things around transparently, and that’s a good thing. But they don’t address the people training, process, and procedure end of things like BSV does.

--joerg

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Joerg

Your line of thinking is quite common among many people, but I disagree -- especially in demanding environments.

Here's why.

Consider any block storage virtualization device with arbitrary storage arrays behind them.

And now, let me ask three simple questions.

1 -- Who supports the end-to-end environment? The storage virtualization vendor? No, they didn't make the arrays. The underlying array vendors? No, they didn't make the storage virtualization device.

Claims to the contrary, it often ends up that the customer ends up shouldering more of the debug and support load -- there's no longer one throat to choke. Maybe that matters, maybe that doesn't.

And, our anecdotal history has confirmed this from many larger customers who've tried this in one part of their environment. And they're not gonna do this anymore.

The exception might be when the storage virtualization vendor has made specific investments to support an end-to-end multivendor environment, and is willing to write an SLA around it. EMC, incidentally, does this for Invista, our BSV.

2 -- What storage array features are available outside the virtualized domain?

Answer none: the BSV doesn't usually have any unique knowledge of array-specific replication, performance optimization, error-handling, etc.

You're limited to whatever functionality the BSV brings to the table -- almost none of the underlying storage goodness is easily leverageable.

They'd better be pretty dumb arrays indeed.

3 -- Are you really saving money and providing a better solution? Run the costs for buying dumb(er) arrays and BSV, as compared to a more traditional in-the-box solution.

We have -- many times -- and the numbers keep coming up the same. You end up with a more cost-effective, more functional and more reliable approach without all the additional complexity.

The exception might (might!) be a customer with a large number of "stranded assets" that are on the books at an unreasonably high value, and wants to pool or consolidate them to wring a bit more life out of them.

But even that's an artifact of unrealistic accounting procedures, and not technical reality.

Still, all that being said, there are a few vendors out there who can only hang their hat on their ability to do block storage virrtualization.

And neither of them seem to be doing too well in the marketplace, IMHO.

Cheers!