ORLANDO, Fla.—Application developers need to do a better job of considering enterprise storage needs. At least, thats the word from a top executive at Computer Associates International Inc.
President and CEO Sanjay Kumar also said Tuesday that storage needs to be accessible from anywhere, easy to manage, always available and housed only on high-throughput devices.
Kumar made his remarks about the concept of “single currency storage” during his keynote address at the Storage Networking World conference here Tuesday morning.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, the Islandia, N.Y., company will introduce a way of looking at software as a collection of distributed storage, he said, though he declined to provide details.
With 2,930 petabytes of data expected to exist by 2004, “the numbers are staggering,” Kumar said. “The [operating systems] of the future are going to become secondary to applications and storage,” he said. “Were also very focused on this idea of location transparency—storage will move further and further away from the platform.”
But performance requirements, management complexity and application complexity are going to be obstacles.
“I would strongly encourage you all to sit side-by-side with application designers,” he said.
Integrating software, storage and management platforms is also becoming far more complex, Kumar said.
“The work that we do today in integration is probably three to four times as much as we did a year ago,” he added. “Integration needs to be not an option, it needs to be a right, a demand.”
But software is only half the picture. Building smarter hardware is important, too, Kumar said. Some CA customers with offices at New York Citys World Trade Center retrieved old tape archives from warehouses after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but were unable to access the data on them because of the hardware.
“Imagine their surprise when they pulled the tapes out and the drives were not made anymore,” he said.
Kumars speech, however, didnt resonate with all attendees. At least one person said his keynote was too focused on CAs own products and services.
“Ive seen him present before, really hes not like this,” said one audience member, the founder of a storage switch maker who asked that his name not be used. Kumars speech was “very disappointing,” he said.