Your essential guide to make the most from storage

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