Your essential guide to make the most from storage

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.”

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