Settling storage differences

Just as the differences between the San and Nas camps are being settled, iSCSI has emerged to unsettle the storage market all over again. Nick Booth reports.

No one could accuse the IT industry of not being green. After all, things are being recycled constantly. Old ideas are repackaged, given a new name and trotted out under a hail of new buzzwords.

Take the storage industry. Now storage is tied up with networking, its development seems to be following a blueprint that was used in the days when the vendors of Token Ring and Ethernet were slugging it out.

Sans were the equivalent of Token Ring; fast but expensive systems that you bought as a long-term investment that surpassed all of your current needs. Nas equated to Ethernet, being cheap and good enough to satisfy your immediate needs.

Just as most companies ended up having a mixture of Lan technologies, storage users, having ignored the wisdom of their suppliers, now find themselves with a mixture of storage systems.

"Whenever there is a choice between a cheap system and a supposedly better system, the cheap one seems to win out," says channel analyst Simon Clark at Katapult-IT.

"Then the vendors will evolve the product to overcome their limitations. If there's a race between two vendors across unknown territory, always back the one that takes small steps."

So three years after vendors tried to make end-users choose either Nas or San, they are now coming round to the idea of convergence. One of the criticisms of Nas was that it is hard to manage.

But people bought it anyway, which created a market opportunity for someone to invent a product that solves the management problem.

First to market was Rainfinity, which recently launched Rainstorage, a system that enables fast data migration that does not force users to take their systems down. Rainfinity seems to be capitalising on the age-old problem that IT buyers take short-term decisions that they need to revise later.

"Companies have gone out and bought their systems, and now they're finding they have to manage them to get better performance," says Reiner Baumann, managing director of Rainfinity. "So now our partners have a great opportunity to help them consolidate those systems."

Mini silos of information mushroomed in size across different departments throughout many organisations. Their rapid, unmanaged growth and dispersal made it hard to get efficient use out of the systems. Rationalising storage in this way will bring about rapid return on investment, Baumann claims.

Andy Chudzik, managing director of storage integrator Positiv, says it is about time people recognised that some compromise is needed.

"Although Nas and San are like oil and water, that doesn't mean they don't work together, although that was the divisive argument made a few years back. Just as oil and water make a good salad dressing, the two technologies are now beginning to complement each other," he says.

Now manufacturers are making San and Nas hybrid products with, say, a Nas gateway to a San. Recently Network Appliance (NetApps) released entry-level versions of its dual Nas and San devices, aiming to convince a sceptical market that combined boxes can reduce costs.

"The future is in combined devices, as the user doesn't have to worry if every box they buy does both (Nas and San)," says David Hitz, executive vice-president of engineering at NetApps.

Tony Lock, chief analyst at Bloor Research, says entry-level systems that can be easily upgraded will appeal to smaller firms with burgeoning storage requirements.

"Nas has typically been the cheaper option, but some applications need San functionality. This should be a good first move into Sans," he says.

Connectivity activity
The real challenge will be in connectivity. But not everyone is convinced that users want combined devices or that they can support a sufficient number of switches and host bus adaptors.

Clause Egge, storage analyst at IDC, says that most enterprises have ended up using both San and Nas, so the practical solution to this fudge has been to build bridges between the two.

"There's a trend of Nas becoming the bridging device into San via the so-called heads, which enables cheap connectivity between those applications that don't need San speeds," Egge says.

Chris Atkins, Sun's storage manager, agrees. "In the long run firms will have one single storage network that offers both file-level and block-level access," he says.

So the real opportunity lies in providing connections between different storage islands. Here we see history repeating itself again. Just as the conflict between two rival camps (Nas and San) seems to be settling, and users start to get their chequebooks out with some confidence, along comes a new proposal to unsettle them.

The invention of iSCSI promises to carry data at the speed you would expect from a San at a price you would expect for Nas. But it is not quite ready yet.

Ian Lockhart, head of professional services at Ideal, says: "All the major manufacturers, such as Adaptec and Emulex, have iSCSI products available.

But until they get the endorsement from the big original equipment manufacturers, there won't be enough confidence among end-users in the product. Once HP and EMC start adopting it there could be some fantastic mass-market opportunities being created."

Every storage vendor has an iSCSI road map, so cheaper storage networks are on their way. In the meantime, while we wait for iSCSI to materialise, the price of existing proven technology is coming down by the week.

When iSCSI arrives, the price of Sans may be so low that end-users might not need a cheap alternative.

Down with downtime
Once storage becomes a mass-market commodity, the next big push will be to sell management services, Lockhart predicts. "For every pound that's spent on storage hardware, there's usually £10 spent on managing it subsequently," he says.

Storage audits and information lifecycle management are today's marketing buzzwords. As is often the case with buzzwords, those in use today usually signal an opportunity that doesn't really materialise for about five years.

Nigel Ifill, managing director of Eurozone Technologies, and a man with 20 years experience of the storage market, says: "We used to call it hierarchical storage management when I was at HP. You allocated different resources to different types of data, depending on how important they were."

Trivial information has always been backed up onto cheap tape, while mission-critical data justifies the expense of being on something fast, such as optical drives. It is questionable whether changing the name of the concept will create a new market for services. But you will see new market opportunities emerge, Ifill argues.

"My company's whole rationale is introducing new technology to meet new needs. In the long term, storage security will be huge, but there's a more immediate niche emerging to find storage solutions to the problems Microsoft Exchange creates," he says.

Arguments about Nas, San and the looming iSCSI are irrelevant, he says. Price competition will soon mean that storage hardware will be a commodity.

The application of storage solutions to a specific problem is where the money will be. For example, when Microsoft Exchange crashes it can take a company two days to pore through the logs before they find out what went wrong and restore a service.

"That's two days downtime for the entire company. Some people get email withdrawal symptoms after two minutes, so you can imagine the pain this causes," Ifill says.

Eurozone is currently creating a market for Solid Data's R2, which cuts downtime to a matter of minutes.

It does this by using solid-state storage to back up logs constantly, so IT managers can identify immediately the log that was taken when the system went down, since it will be the last to be recorded. Two days' worth of log searching is eliminated.

"The good thing about selling our product - apart from the margins - is it's an easily understood proposition and doesn't take too much training," Ifill adds. "Other parts of the storage market shift around so much that resellers are constantly jumping through hoops."

This isn't the fault of the market makers, says Derek Warry, strategic alliance director at InTechnology. He claims his company has always advocated putting business needs first, so that the correct technologies can be employed.

San could be good for heavy traffic, whereas office and email-type applications suit Nas. But the gaps between the technologies are closing.

"The answer lies in getting the correct assessment undertaken in the first place," he says.

The inevitable 'lock-in' by the vendors has resulted in differences within the application of the technology, Warry claims.

"You still can't replicate between an IBM storage sub-system and an HP subsystem, which is bad news for the customer," he adds.

The answer to incompatibility is virtualisation, he says, while admitting it is a misunderstood concept whose mention causes some panic among users.

"I see virtualisation as a godsend for customers. It gives them a pool of storage not tied to any vendor, and it does more to protect their existing investment," says Warry.

Good housekeeping
If that is true, it lends support to the movement towards commoditising storage.

With the cost per megabyte of storage plummeting, users will be tempted to buy more and more storage, and put the housekeeping duties off for another day.

They shouldn't, of course. They should be planning and strategising, having endless meetings about migration, back-ups and storage lifecycles. That or just ordering another terabyte of storage.

"I can see why people throw hardware at the problem," says Stephen Owen, Adaptec's European product manager. "It's a lot easier than sitting through endless, agonising meetings."

With Adaptec leading the way with cheaper iSCSI products, he probably would be pleased with that idea. The historical precedent for today's uncertain market conditions can again be found in networking's past.

Manufacturers were always urging end-users to manage the traffic on the networks more efficiently, but in the end they just went out and bought more bandwidth instead. And with prices going through the floor, who could blame them?

But at some stage, users will have to do some housekeeping rather than keep buying bigger premises. You might be able to store and back up terabytes of data, but why bother when 90 per cent of it could be taken out of circulation?

This will be great for the likes of Legato and Veritas which will capitalise when everyone needs to bring their storage networks under control.

Nigel Williams, vice-president marketing at Legato, says: "Automating storage processes for customers across Sans and Nas will be a big opportunity. Once you're established you can start auditing and consolidating their storage."

The good news is resellers can get vendor-independent training from the Storage Networking Industry Association, which means you can gain wider competence without shelling out to every vendor.

Ultimately, though, this will become a services market. Interxion is a new breed of vendor that sells its Secure Data Service through resellers and systems integrators.

Anthony Foy, the compapny's managing director says: "This solution will be offered as a managed service, which will guarantee resellers revenue overtime because it encourages customer lock-in.

"Resellers traditionally sell one-off boxes for one-off payments, with a possibility of upgrades somewhere down the line. This is more long-term and better for the customers."

It is going to be a services market then. But if you needed proof that there's still money to be made in it, note the fact that BT Indirect Channels is not only getting into this market but doing a lot of the groundwork for its partners. Now there's a break with the past.

Rental arithmetic
Many resellers fed up with jumping through endless fiery hoops to get accreditation from different vendors are looking at other options.

A new service from RentStore offers users an alternative to capital purchase: rental. This is another 1980s idea that has come back in fashion, admits Tim Wickes, marketing director at RentStore. "Rental agreements make it easier to close business.

"They improve margins, bring repeat business and the reseller gets paid up front. Customers pay only a monthly rent for the hardware and software, and can upgrade when new products are available. This eliminates two key reasons for decision delays: lack of capital budget and the fear of obsolescence."

Consultancy Seams recently implemented an IT rental strategy for its storage and network servers.

John Phillips, its chairman, says the rapid development and cost reductions in IT storage will mean that Seams will be able to upgrade on a bi-annual basis, doubling capacity and increasing performance for the same monthly rental.

"Renting is a least-cost strategy," he says.

One of RentStore's accredited resellers, Corporate Hardware, finds rental helps to win bigger orders too.

Richard Trevarthen, its commercial director, says: "Without capital budget constraints, users tend to order more sophisticated and powerful systems, not what they can make do with.

"We had the case recently, where an order doubled in value when the user realised what a monthly rental could facilitate."

Contacts:

Adaptec (01276) 854 510
www.adaptec.com

Brocade (0118) 965 3789
www.brocade.com

Eurozone Technologies (020) 8744 1926
www.eurozone-tech.com

Ideal (020) 8286 5000
www.ideal.co.uk

InTechnology (01423) 850 000
www.intechnology.co.uk

Katapult-IT (01932) 227 982
www.katapult-it.com

Legato (01628) 511 811
www.legato.com

Posetiv (1753) 672 755
www.posetiv.com

Quocirca (01285) 771 433
www.quocirca.com

Rainfinity (01494) 582 014
www.rainfinity.com

RentStore (01628) 668 841
www.rentstore.co.uk

Sun (01252) 421 417
www.uk.sun.com