Your essential guide to make the most from storage

Servers that simultaneously handle file and block-level storage have turned the argument about which to choose on its head and opened opportunities for resellers to profit from the technology shift.

Storage area networks, or SANs, were preferred by big enterprises and government because of their speed and efficiency while network attached storage, or NASes, that store data as files were often to be found in small businesses. And although the two acronyms often confuse newcomers and customers, technology has reached a point where “it no longer needs to be a discussion around SAN or NAS”, says EMC storage manager Mark Oakey.

EMC has released its VNX storage that is configured either way, following NetApp’s lead with the FAS2000 series. “The distinction between buying a SAN and a NAS has evolved quite quickly,” says IBRS storage analyst Kevin McIsaac.

“It’s not that one is better than the other or that SAN is higher performance, it’s not really true. NetApp is leading this market and EMC is following with this new product.”

He said the question is whether a device can adapt to the many needs users put on it.

“But more importantly, how easy is it to manage and how efficiently can it manage the storage?” asks Dr McIsaac. “Those are the real things that people have been looking at and it is one of the reasons that NetApp has been so successful.”

Analyst IDC published a paper last year forecasting that by 2014 the market for unified storage would outstrip SAN storage. Cheaper, easier-to-use storage is great news for small to medium businesses or branch offices that rarely have money for a specialist.

The unification of storage has two interesting impacts on the IT channel. First, customers who stuck with the same storage (file or block) from the same vendor can more easily buy from competing vendors. And it makes it easier for resellers to sell products from other vendors.

“In the SME market what’s been called unified storage makes an awful lot of sense,” Dr McIsaac says. “It’s no longer so important what the protocol is. What’s more important are the features of the array.”

The most important feature is the terabyte cost: “This is high on people’s lists”. A better way to choose storage is to assess the useable terabyte cost, “and that’s a little more complicated”.

RAID and mirrored configurations affect available space. Dr McIsaac points to NetApp as a vendor that has done “a really good job” in efficiency by adding de- duplication that it claims cuts storage needs in half.

Snapshot backups are another feature in demand. Rather than taking a replica of the data, a snapshot is taken quickly, backed up online and later to tape. It indirectly raises productivity; a development team can test software upgrades on a snapshot of live data.

Next page: Ease of use

Ease of use

A sweeping trend towards ease of use, spread upwards from consumer technology through the iPhone and iPad, has begun changing the design of enterprise technology, storage included.

Dr McIsaac gives the example of how it has affected how drives are mapped to storage. The old way was to fix mapping from hard disks to RAIDs and then to logical unit numbers that represent a tape drive or hard drive. This rigid approach to provisioning resulted unused or wasted storage.

Newer methods aggregate storage into pools to which a user maps a drive directly. “They are more flexible and simpler to manage,” he says. And that ease is a reason behind NetApp’s success.

Thin provisioning, where blocks of data are allocated to storage on demand rather than allocating up front, is valuable but you need to know when and where it is valuable. Thin provisioning addresses the difficulty many businesses have in correctly assessing how much storage they need. The complex nature of storage has made it hard to expand and as a result IT managers tend to over-allocate and overspend.

“The benefit of thin provisioning is that you don’t have to worry about that,” Dr McIsaac says.

EMC is selling ease of use with its VNX, which chief executive Joe Tucci promotes as a watershed product.

The VNX has a graphical interface for SAN and NAS configurations and a wizard to create iSCSI volumes or VMware or HyperV environments in 10 clicks.

“Across all sizes of organisations, they don’t have the ability to invest in specialists, they only have generalists,” says EMC’s Oakey. “You don’t need to be a storage guru.”

EMC denies that the VNX is a response to NetApp’s success but rather to market demands. “It’s the case that that’s where the market growth is coming from. You can consolidate your direct attach and disparate server farms and have a lower TCO.”

Ease of use runs all the way through to deployment, which also has an impact on the type of storage chosen.

Mark Nielsen, HP’s storage business manager for the South Pacific, says that customers are looking for solutions that can handle both SAN and NAS configurations in a single appliance. Virtualisation is a key driver behind this approach.

”Many customers are using HP blade technology and running a virtualisation layer over the top – VMware, HyperV or Citrix,” Nielsen says. He says 50 to 70 percent of storage is sold as virtualised infrastructure. Much is sold as part of HP’s Blade System Matrix, a converged solution integrating storage, server, networking and management.

“When I go out and talk about storage I talk more about Blade System Matrix because it drags the storage with it. We encourage partners to talk about Blade System Matrix because at the end of the day customers need to make sure that infrastructure is resilient and they can procure services very quickly.”

Next page: NAS grows up

NAS comes of age

The ability to buy storage with protocols for SAN and NAS overshadows one of the big developments in storage – the maturation of the file server. For years the thinking was that if you wanted high performance, you needed a SAN.

“There’s often a misconception that NAS is a low- end, file-serving device. The truth is a good NAS appliance like Sun ZFS server and NetApp have good performance,” Dr McIsaac says. “Speaking to admins, many prefer to run VMware clusters on NetApp NAS than [EMC’s] Clariion SAN.”

The rising capabilities of NAS servers have even seen them take on the arduous role of running databases. McIsaac points to Oracle which released “a great little machine” which can run applications or files as a NAS server or an Oracle database.

“It really tells you that NAS servers aren’t just for serving up files. They can run databases serving up big clusters,” Dr McIsaac says, who adds Oracle has been running databases on NAS since 2002.

According to Angus MacDonald, chief technology officer, Systems Line of Business, Oracle ANZ, “SANs to a great extent are the reliable and safe enterprise storage and NAS had always been seen as the second tier. We’ve now reached the stage where NAS is good enough and is still cheaper and easy to use”.

Oracle’s 7000 range of ZFS-based unified storage comes with 10 data protocols in one box and can use SATA disks or flash storage. Customers can use it just as a NAS, or they can use it as a SAN without buying any more software. A separate connector needs to be bought for Fibre Channel but none is required if using Infiniband or Ethernet.

Oracle still sells its SAN-only 6000 range of appliances but MacDonald says “more and more” people are interested in the unified storage approach because of its flexibility and manageability. Oracle doesn’t sell standalone NAS storage.

“It’s not really economical to manufacture a NAS-only type device. The intention behind the 7000 is to change the dynamics of that market,” MacDonald says.

Unified storage gives SMBs the opportunity to experiment with the more expensive SAN technology which has often been out of reach. Direct attached is still the most cost-effective way to add storage, “but that’s changing”, EMC’s Oakey says.

Small-business owners lack the knowledge to buy SAN storage which opens the door to resellers becoming the trusted adviser to their customers. “These business owners don’t have the time to step away and educate themselves. Typically the partner needs to put this into business sense – what does it mean for the business – rather than talking in IT speak.”

Although analysts predict sales of unified storage will sweep past dedicated SANs, it’s too early to consign the technology to the museum. “We don’t see SAN going away for some time, if ever,” Oracle’s MacDonald says.

IBM remains a true believer in SANs. Most of its storage sales – as much as 90 percent, according to IBM storage manager Gavin Toovey – are SANs, with the rest made up of NetApp unified storage devices rebadged as the N Series.

It is an entry-level product which combines SAN or NAS and is built to scale up. And it sells SONAS, a NAS for massive input-output, scale-out storage.

Toovey says that when it comes to databases, SAN block storage is superior. He says a unified or NAS-only appliance can run into trouble if deployed incorrectly. “All storage devices when deployed in the right environment are fine, the performance is good. You just need to be careful that you don’t put the wrong device in the wrong environment.

“If it is deployed in the wrong environment it can have problems. If you deployed it to support a database for example, it might struggle. That’s where a SAN-type box would be better suited.”

Next page:How to choose a vendor

The single-vendor solution

The conventional way of buying storage – drawing up a features list and comparing on price per terabyte – is being challenged by vertically integrated solutions. In what’s being billed as a return to the mainframe, vendors are rolling out preconfigured solutions with server, storage and networking that are sometimes optimised for specific applications.

“I personally believe that rather than buying horizontal storage for many machines you’re better off finding a solution provider who can provide a complete solution,” IBRS’ Dr McIsaac says. “I’d go to Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM and say, ‘I run this many VMs, this is what their workload looks like’, toss it over to them and see what they come back with. If they come back with a couple of blades tied to a storage system then that should be all I need.”

HP’s Nielsen says the advantage of converged solutions such as the Blade System Matrix is that they have highly automated provisioning of virtual machines and attached storage, which reduces the time it takes to spin up another service and can be done on demand.

Dr McIsaac says customers are turning against the integrator approach because it costs too much and takes too long to get running.

“In the next three to five years a lot of people will just buy computer configurations off the shelf. In the high end of the market I’m seeing people starting to buy this way. “Instead of taking a month to get working and $50,000 to $60,000 getting it ready, it arrives on the Friday and by Monday they can load up the VMs and start working.”

There are two fears in returning to the days of AS400s and minicomputers – vendor lock-in and the inability to choose best-of-breed components. Dr McIsaac says that the first case is a factor in component based systems anyway and that the second is outweighed by the savings.

“Is it cheaper for me to buy separate storage and servers and then pay a very small integration company to put it all together? Or do I just go to Oracle and buy one of their machines and it all comes prepackaged ready to go, I turn it on and I can start working? Ultimately I think that’s the better way of doing this.”

He says storage vendors such as NetApp and EMC will tell customers and resellers that integrated storage is not the way to go but only because they don’t sell it themselves. Oakey responds that EMC is working closely with Cisco in building a best-of-class solution based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture.

Oracle claims to be in the unique position of having its own storage, server, middleware and application portfolio. “The Exadata is the classic example of how we’ve optimised the database to use storage and be able to do things that are only possible because we own the IP across the stack.

“You will start to see excursions in that direction from our competitors as well. Ultimately I think that will become attractive to partners as a differentiator as they go to customers as well,” MacDonald says.

But what about the piece that is missing from the Oracle portfolio – networking?

Oracle says it does make its own Infiniband and 10Gb Ethernet networking switches to handle interconnections within the data centre. The vendor says it has no interest in competing with Brocade and Cisco. “We aim to use a faster backplane between nodes and then other vendors to distribute to the rest of the network,” MacDonald says. And he says Infiniband is becoming more popular.

Other vendors look to roll out vertically integrated solutions. Dell is assembling “business-ready” bundles and says the integrated appliance “is certainly an avenue we will pursue”. For now it is telling resellers that integrated appliances will result in “less dollars for partners in terms of deployment”.

“At this point, we haven’t seen the impact of those solutions in the market,” says Dell’s Beck. And IBM is working on converged solutions, although it has no release dates. “I don’t think the industry is heading totally there yet. All this will be a little bit of time. There will be more developments in converged products over the near term,” Toovey says.

IBM’s only server and storage appliances are dedicated to business intelligence. Cognos has an Intel appliance that accelerates such queries sent to a SAP database.

“It extracts the data and pulls it into the server and makes it easier to retrieve and manipulate,” Toovey says. He believes the integrated approach will be popular with SMBs. “They open up the possibility of solutions being tightly integrated, less complex, easier to use and cheaper.”

Next page: Services your hedge against hardware declines

Sliding up the stack

As integrated appliances remove the need for profitable integration services, resellers will need to look up the stack for other services which they can sell. These tend to be around the applications layer and vendors claim they are already helping resellers in this adjustment.

HP’s Nielsen says there are two booming areas for resellers to move into. Many HP resellers are already consulting in VMware, the dominant leader in virtualisation software, as the swing towards server virtualisation continues.

“There are a lot of dollars to be made by our resellers around virtualisation consultancy services.”

Another strong market is in Exchange migration and consulting. Nielsen says 74 percent of the installed base of Microsoft Exchange is on Exchange 2003, for which Microsoft plans to discontinue services at the end of the year. “And by 2012 all those customers will need to move to [Exchange] 2010. Resellers can really help customers with doing that migration,” Nielsen says.

Oracle’s channel strategy with Exadata, Exalogic and the forthcoming supercluster was to provide building blocks for resellers on which they could sell higher services, MacDonald says.

“We would rather ship an engineered solution where the hack work is done in the factory rather than the partners spending their time doing that. We’d rather the partners add their own unique value to users.

“I have done a number of CIO breakfasts and lunches with partners that are looking at adding the value above the hardware stack. Hardware expertise is being de- accented to an extent and the focus is on the deployment up the stack where the focus is on the customer.”

EMC offers a range of specialties for partners to differentiate themselves as they move up the stack such as backup and disaster recovery. “I don’t think [the integrated approach is] eroding their services options. It’s making it simpler for them as a systems integrator to stand-up solutions and do proofs of concept a lot quicker and be able to deploy and migrate in a more efficient way,” Oakey says.