For the past decade or more there has been a war on between server and storage people over who will ultimately be the dominant technology platform in the data center. At the moment, servers remain dominant, but storage continues to rise in importance because of its ability to manage and control data in isolation from servers. That ability is increasingly turning servers into commodity compute engines that many people jokingly say are well on their way to becoming peripherals to storage products.

But as we enter into 2007, a new phenomenon is starting to make itself felt in the form of storage management software from companies such as LeftHand Networks that is being deployed directly on servers. In today's environment, this adds up to little more than repurposing lower-cost server hardware to serve as a dedicated device for running the storage management software. This, of course, can be attractive to IT organizations that have a lot of excess server hardware lying around in the wake of any number of server consolidation efforts.

But looking further down the road it appears that the advent of multicore servers may once and for all turn storage into little more than dumb peripheral devices attached to smart servers that manage all the storage assets. The reason for this is that a server running four or more processors can allocate any one of those processors to power the storage management software. This would mean storage vendors who are currently getting a lot of money selling complex dedicated hardware systems would find their products essentially being made redundant by servers that come with their own built-in capabilities to manage storage assets across the network.

This may take awhile to play out and may also account for why companies such as EMC are making every effort to become software companies that specialize in data management. But in the meantime, the longstanding war for supremacy between server and storage camps within the vendor community will continue at least until quad-core processor servers become the norm rather than the exception in the data center.