The nascent idea of NAS
The nascent idea of NAS
Network attached storage is an idea whose time has come, but where does it fit between direct attached storage and storage area networks?
It is often said that the vast majority of electronic data is still stored at the level of direct attached storage (DAS) - i.e., on hard drives attached directly to the computer being used by the person who generates the data. With the proliferation of PCs, notebooks and handheld devices, there are more islands of data than ever stored on disk drives that are unreachable from the central network.
This is where network attached storage is supposed to fit in. It is still based on file serving, like hard disk drives in PCs, but the files are transferred over the network away from individual users’ control to centralised repositories where the capacity of the hardware can be managed more efficiently through storage management software.
Gary Jackson, Asia Pacific vice president for EMC, claimed that users of DAS achieved only 30 per cent utilisation of their storage capacity, whereas NAS users regularly gained 90 to 100 per cent usage.
”The real issue about networked storage going forward is that a disk is a disk is a disk. The real issue is the information management layer, the software and services,” he said.
Randy Chalfant, director of advanced technology at StorageTek, said that up to 75 per cent of expenditure on any given IT project could be for the storage component, which he said was a “gluttonous amount”. Part of the problem, he said, was the exponential increase of storage capacity which was not being matched by the linear rate of progress in storage management software.
”Even though that is a huge component of spending, the cost of storage hardware is cheaper, but that is part of the problem. A much larger issue is the management of it,” he said. “We think the problem is, when you talk to people, everyone universally agrees that they have flat or declining budgets. They have less money to get more done than last year, but growth rates for storage demand are 80 per cent compounded annually. It is growing at a rate which is ridiculous to keep up with.”
One of the major trends in the networked storage area in recent months has been the move to create so-called “hybrid” devices which can be incorporated into either NAS or SAN environments. Network Appliance, long associated with the NAS industry, has adopted what it calls a “unified storage approach” based on standardised networking technologies, with a new flagship hybrid product called the FAS900 series which supported Fibre Channel networking.
Michael Burnie, managing director of Network Appliance for Australia and New Zealand, said the release was part of a push by the company on the concept of a unified storage approach, where most of the complexity on the network was managed through standardised software, not proprietary hardware.
”Network Appliance has led the NAS space for eight to 10 years through building simplicity and reliability into our products. This same approach will be taken with our SAN capability. Our philosophy remains the same, we are now offering another protocol on the network side: that is, block level access,” he said.
Mr Burnie said that the storage industry would move into “investigation of information” across standardised infrastructure, rather than the more rigid proprietary methods used currently such as DAS - which he said was still used for two-thirds of all storage.
”We’re starting to think in terms of storage networking, as opposed to just SAN or NAS,” he said. “The next wave of storage unification sees one device allowing customers to choose either SAN or NAS connectivity. The customer’s issue will be meeting their storage needs, not getting hung up on what underlying technology to use. They will use one box for NAS and SAN.”
Dell and EMC have also moved into this area recently with the launch of the various devices in the CX range, which were developed by EMC but will be manufactured by Dell. The CX devices - including a low-end CX200 model, mid-range CX400 and top-end CX600 box - are nominally NAS devices but can also be incorporated into a SAN environment, according to Rob Small, marketing director for Dell.
”We have converged the two technologies, NAS and SAN, across the entire CX range,” he said.
Mr Small said the hybrid device would allow storage administrators who were upgrading from DAS to avoid worrying about whether to make the small migration to NAS or the more daunting leap directly to SAN, as they could move their standalone NAS file-serving functions into becoming just another application layer on their SAN.
”The best file-serving technology is NAS, so NAS becomes just another app on the network,” he said. “The NAS specification is targeted at file serving, at being able to share storage for clients on desktop PCs. SANs are all about storage on application servers, and app servers use block-based access. Moving NASs into being an application on a SAN means we have the best of both worlds.”
The advent of technology standards championed by the Storage Networking Industry Association has meant that the differences between hardware platforms has lessened. Specifically, the SNIA standards known collectively as the Common Information Model (CIM), comprising a technology called Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and the set of specifications formerly known as Bluefin, now called the Storage Management Initiative (SMI), have become a major centre of activity for storage vendors.
Sun was the first to roll out a CIM-compliant product, having included the feature in its StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager released in August. Hitachi said it would follow by the end of the year within the HiCommand Management Framework of its Hitachi Data Systems subsidiary. IBM and Veritas also promised to add CIM compliance to their hardware and software products during 2003, with IBM saying its disk drives and Tivoli applications would be the main carriers of the technology, while Veritas said its SANPoint Control and SANPoint Control applications would be among those to gain compliance.
This move away from proprietary hardware has led to another major trend in NAS devices: the commoditisation of the hardware. In the last two months, Quantum, Iomega, EMC and Hewlett-Packard have all announced plans to outsource manufacturing of some of their hardware products, which points to a decreasing reliance on differentiation in componentry.
Arguably one of the more important movements in the NAS industry in this vein, particularly for small business NAS users, was the announcement by Quantum that it would spin off its NAS business into a separate company called Snap Appliance. Snap Appliance also merged its assets, consisting of
Quantum’s Snap Server and Guardian product plus a “significant” number of Quantum’s employees who worked in its NAS division, with those of a privately-held firm called Broadband Storage. Broadband Storage was a start-up that was itself spun off from Delphi Engineering in the year 2000, which specialised in hybrid NAS and storage area network (SAN) hardware, using Fibre Channel instead of IP-based networking, which it called “scaleable unified storage”.
The situation for end users is not likely to change, since the Snap Server and Guardian products will continue to be sold by existing distributors and resellers. Quantum and Snap Appliance said they would both provide support for the two product lines for existing customers.
For its part, Quantum will focus the efforts of its Storage Solutions Group on data protection software. The company said the transaction was a “major component of the second phase of Quantum’s two-phased restructuring plan, which was announced on September 9”. The first part of the restructure involved sacking 1,100 employees and outsourcing production of its hardware. The restructure quickly followed the appointment of former SGI and Microsoft executive Rick Belluzzo as Quantum’s CEO on September 3.
In the case of Iomega, which had used Maxtor as an OEM partner before the latter company exited the NAS business several months ago (see September/October issue, page 12), the company said it was standing up to the challenge. Scott Dillon, senior manager for Australia and NZ at Iomega, said the original equipment manufacturer agreement with Maxtor had ended well over a year ago.
”Since that time, we have worked on developing our own product,” he said. “The guys in the US have put lot of work into the design.”
The production of Iomega’s new NAS boxes is outsourced to separate factories. Mr Dillon said the previous OEM offering had been “quite obviously a Maxtor rebadged unit”, and that the company acknowledged up front that the NAS market was “vastly different” to its more familiar business of Zip drives.
”Previously when we dabbled into NAS products, we were putting the tip of our toes into the water to see whether the market would accept an Iomega NAS,” he said.
However, the new hardware lines are now firmly Iomega products, and Mr Dillon said the company had “confidence” in its success, particularly with Maxtor leaving the industry.”There is a huge market of opportunity for us to fill,” he said. “A big part of the reason we moved in to this is we were looking at the Gartner and IDC growth forecasts.
The growth patterns four or five years out for storage is huge. [We have confidence in] that analyst indication, and our ability to develop products with our partners.”
The Iomega NAS range comprises seven models. There is one entry level product, a sealed Unix-based unit with RAID 5 on board that retails at $3,199. The other six models are comprised of pairs of 160GB, 320GB and 480GB boxes, one of which supports Microsoft’s various platforms, and the other which supports all flavours of Unix, including Linux. All six models feature hot-swappable hard disk drives, a feature much needed by the small businesses to which the products are aimed, according to Mr Dillon.
”In NAS units, if anything is prone to failure, it would be the failure of the hard drive,” he said. “When you’ve got your small business backing up its data onto a NAS unit, the last thing the administrator wants is their business data to go off in a van somewhere, and hope it comes back.”