Drives for dollars, tape for cents

One of the biggest buzzwords in storage these days is virtualisation, which is understandable given that one vendor, VMWare, recently passed Oracle and Microsoft as the fastest growing company in history.

While the future may be virtual, the present for SMBs is not, according to IDC's Penn, as it is normally beyond their budget and outside the skills of in-house admin.

Virtualisation covers a range of topics but can basically be summarised as employing software to maximise the use of hardware and personnel. For example file virtualisation makes multiple arrays appear as one pool of storage, a technology clearly more applicable to the enterprise.

Allan King, managing director of Infront Systems, once shared the belief that virtualisation was only good for larger customers. But the Canberra-based integrator has been selling ESX Server to SMBs interested in maximising server performance as well as the more orthodox use of pooling storage on various appliances.

King cites the case of an accounting firm with six servers running Solution 6-style software that is under enormous pressure at this time of year to meet deadlines.

Vmotion, a feature in ESX Server, uses clustering to move data between the servers seamlessly. The firm can migrate data across to a new server and remove the old one with no slowdown in performance or downtime. The ability to invisibly add or remove extra servers - akin to hot-swapping RAID drives - is a tremendous benefit to maintenance and increasing performance on the fly.

"The SMB has a strong focus on business continuity but hasn't been able to afford it, particularly the skill sets that go with these topologies," King says.

Although the software is expensive - ESX Server retails for around $7500 per box - it can pay for itself by removing the need for extra hardware.

Servers running single applications only run their processors at 3 to 7 percent power, a problem even more pronounced with new dual-core chips. However, virtualisation can work the processor much harder by running several applications on the one box, lifting processor performance from 5 percent to 60 percent and resulting in big savings.

Instead of buying 10 servers at $10,000 apiece to run 10 applications, one larger server with more memory and a copy of ESX Server can do the same work for around $20,000, King says. "That's a saving of $80,000 straight up."

Less hardware equals less maintenance, downtime and support costs, which is good news to any business regardless of size.

Disaster recovery (DR) also looks like a promising opportunity. Virtualisation can bring down the expense of proper DR, which otherwise requires running a one-to-one ratio of hardware and software, a proposition much too expensive for SMBs. The stringent demands of government agencies push requirements beyond SMB territory but it is worth noting that even with big budgets, tight DR regimes are only possible with investment by the customer in in-house staff. "Zero data loss and 30-minute recovery time is fine as long as you invest in the people and the skills," King says.

While not exactly virtualisation, the evolution of management software is making storage much easier for the SMB to understand and use.

Microsoft is attempting to place itself in centre stage with its recent announcement called Simple SAN. The four or five leading vendors in storage have been propositioned by the desktop king to integrate natively all their management tools into Windows Server edition. The aim is to manage all storage using the familiar Windows interface, thereby removing a level of training and expense for the SMB.

At the time of writing this article, HDS is the only vendor to have a Microsoft-certified product to market, which uses a very simple Windows-style wizard to configure and manage disk space. But Microsoft's intentions underline the power of simplicity as a selling point to SMBs. The harried and overworked SMB tech who often has little skills beyond basic networking and desktop troubleshooting can manage the business' storage "with nothing more than Microsoft skills", says HDS' marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand Tim Smith. "It makes it a very safe choice to offer a client."

Recovering from disaster

A similar scene plays itself in small businesses across the country each night - the company owner waiting after work for the backup to finish, then driving home with the valuable tape in his pocket, perhaps to store in a safe at home. Tape is certainly cheap but questions have been asked as to how effective it is at doing its job.

Backing up to tape usually takes several hours, and a master backup may take the entire weekend. It is a safe assumption that no SMBs bother to check the veracity of the backup once it is completed, mainly because it is simply too difficult to do. During the backup process there could be a power glitch that corrupts data, a virus may have already penetrated the file system or the backup software could be incorrectly configured.

When disaster comes and the tape is serially read back again - a very time-consuming process - the data may be unusable. IDC says this scenario occurs a staggering 70 percent of the time when attempting to restore from tape.

There is no disputing that tape is the cheapest storage medium and the technology one of the most mature, but industry watchers believe it is not the right product for the first level of backup. Just as "you would never use disks for long-term archiving, you would never use tape for fast recovery," says Rob Stirling, spokesman for StorageCraft.

Price drops have now brought the concept of disk-to-disk-to-tape within the budgets of SMBs, short-term backups of the main servers to disk storage, and regular archiving to tape. Not only does the intermediary level of backup provide a second safety check, but the recovery times are reduced from several hours to a matter of minutes, thanks to the ability of hard drives to randomly access the right data almost instantaneously.

For SMBs, proper data recovery "hasn't been affordable so they just don't do it," Stirling says. StorageCraft's new ShadowProtect software takes imaging to the SMB, making exact snapshots of a hard drive - warts and all, says Stirling - which can be rolled back to within minutes. Prices start at $95 for one desktop licence to $1495 for an unlimited number of laptops and desktops.

Iomega also has tape firmly in its sights. The vendor of the extremely popular Zip drive, which found its way into many SOHO workplaces, has been pushing its successor, the Rev drive. The Rev uses sealed disk drives and a 10-tape autoloader to cherrypick one of the best advantages of the hard drive - fast data access - with tape's longevity, promising a 30-year shelf life. The disks can also be ejected for off-site storage after entering a password.

Each Rev disk stores 35GB native or 90GB compressed, transfers at 25MB per second and the drive has a small enough footprint to stand on a desk. The stand-alone drive retails at $600, with each disk costing $99, and the 10-slot autoloader $2199.

Quantum has a similar product, called the GoVault, which is selling well, according to Mal Shaw, general manager of sales at Express Data. Given the choice between tape's capacity and disk's faster recovery times, Shaw has also noticed a shift towards disk-to-disk backup over disk-to-tape.

Despite its drawbacks and the many contenders, tape itself is not going anywhere, thanks to prices per gigabyte as low as five cents. Storage capacity continues to increase at a faster rate than disk with companies like Quantum releasing tapes that hold 800GB before compression. Given the lack of a file system and therefore no limits on block sizes, drives also are faster to back up and more reliable for long-term storage, boasting a 30-year guaranteed lifetime.

Although the tape story has changed little over the years, autoloaders holding up to 16 tapes have dropped in price and now offer a way to remove tape's biggest weakness - human involvement.

"Don't create a backup solution for clients where they have to change tapes on a daily basis," says Quantum's country manager for Australia and New Zealand, Craig Tamlin. Automation lessens the prospect of human error, which Tamlin claims is responsible for 60 percent of problems with tape.

There are several vendors producing tape drives and cartridges although all are not equal. Those at the higher end such as Quantum sell drives with 100 percent duty cycles that can run 24 hours a day, where cheaper drives will quickly expire if required to work beyond three to five hours a night, says Tamlin.

However, the extra quality comes at a cost. Quantum's value-priced cartridges are nearly double the cost of equivalents from other vendors, such as Exabyte.

Finding your place

There are so many variations to the storage theme that resellers need to identify the areas essential to their customers and keep their focus, says IDC's Penn. Within security alone there are biometric devices, encryption, smart cards, surveillance cameras and soon RFID tags, which are all useful within the right vertical market. Unfortunately storage is no longer defined as just a bunch of disks; it is now a process that must be overseen for the lifetime of the business, and in some cases even beyond.

Penn advises hiring outside help for difficult jobs that cross over the cusp of a reseller's knowledge, or turn to the vendor or distributor for assistance rather than attempt to provide all the skills in-house.

There are no universal solutions in storage these days. Customers need to consult their reseller carefully, and maybe the vendor too, to find something that meets their needs. "You can't say, learn these three things [about storage] and you can go have a holiday in Fiji," says Penn. "That's not the case at all."