The network spreads
The network spreads
The coming era of virtual networked storage holds a promise of of greater data accessibility, but how far down the road is the technology?
The growing penetration of the Internet has highlighted the need for organisations to have their data available 24 hours a day just to maintain business, let alone to develop it.
US auction site eBay offered a recent example of the price a business can pay for not being available to its customers, when its site went down last August.
Just four hours of down time caused the company's share price to drop 10 per cent, aside from the revenue it would have directly lost through the incident.
"The Internet has made every company a 24-hour-per-day, seven-day-per-week operation, and made them more dependent on their computer systems than ever before," said Dave Anderson, director of systems storage architecture at Seagate Technology.
Along with this reliance on systems, organisations are generating more data from the increased number of transactions they perform during their constant operation.
Networked solutions have established a new paradigm for storage. Company or data growth no longer necessarily means having to purchase more storage infrastructure; rather, an organisation can develop a network to expand the effectiveness of its original investment.
TWO FORMS
These networked solutions currently appear in two forms. The Storage Area Network (SAN) is a storage management technology in which workstations and application servers connect via fibre optic cable to backup servers.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) addresses server management by allowing users to introduce a new server to the network to handle storage capacity.
Networked storage solutions also make all of an organisation's data available to all users, not just to those connected to a certain server or in a particular location, extending the organisation's availability for its own staff.
"The market has been saturated with the pain of storage," said HDS SAN manager Steve Robins. "We are focusing on the second generation user who has come to understand the value of networked storage through their own experiences."
SPREADING SOLUTION
Vendors generally agree that it has been users' interest in better managing their storage solution that has helped drive the SAN and NAS markets. The push to consolidate existing storage has come in part from businesses expecting growth,and also wanting to learn to manage their storage capacities now.
It has also been fuelled by business' realising they will have to maintain development to be viable to their customers.
"There is a huge interest in streamlining storage management by consolidating the storage attached to multiple servers into a single pool that can then be managed from one point for all of the servers," said Mr Anderson. "Managing their storage is the biggest issue end users face.
"SANs make reconfiguring and adding storage to groups of servers easier and less costly. They also make far more efficient use of backup resources, by investing in a single more sophisticated tape library, for instance, instead of having dedicated small tape drives on each of several servers.
"These improve the ability of systems to operate with less down time," Mr Anderson added.
SANs have been promoted as the solution for expanding original storage. However, Quantum ATL marketing manager for Asia Pacific, Rick Sewell, said that many users are choosing not to toy with existing technology at older sites, and are instead implementing them in new or 'greenfield' sites.
As well as reducing down time, consolidating servers can come to a simple matter of economics. According to HDS storage product manager Abie Gelbart, more than 50 per cent of the total storage costs in a decentralised environment count toward managing storage. He estimated that consolidation could bring this down to between 15 and 20 per cent.
In spite of this eventual financial benefit, Mr Sewell said that the cost of establishing a fibre optic cable network and introducing switches, hubs and other infrastructure to support the SAN, make the solution prohibitive for many organisations.
NOT IDEAL YET
Although the SAN can theoretically support a multi-platform environment, the solutions currently on offer are plagued by standards and interoperability issues, preventing the open system the SAN was designed to engender.
"Not many organisations are embracing SAN because of standards issues," said Mr Gelbart. "Some, however, are beginning to conservatively use hubs and other infrastructure for consolidation."
The international Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) has been created to help resolve the standards issue, and vendors are also becoming more involved in developing SAN elements that interoperate, in the interest of propelling the technology in which many have heavily invested.
As it is much of SAN's basic infrastructure, such as the switches and hubs that enable the network, will not interoperate.
Mr Gelbart said that it is crucial to first resolve this before SAN will take off with users, simply because there is less incentive to purchase a storage solution that locks users into a proprietary network.
"SANs needs to be open and offer plug-and-play capabilities like the Internet to be viable for many organisations," said Mr Gelbart.
"If we don't enforce standards, SAN is simply not going to work," said Compaq manager of enterprise products Steven Bovis.
Industry experts generally agree that interoperability has placed SAN one to two years away from being fully realised and embraced by organisations.
As NAS enables a plug-and-play solution now, it has particularly drawn workgroups keen to lighten the storage load on their servers now and at a reduced cost. "NAS is simple, and it is here and now, which makes it important for business," said Melinda Sewart, country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Procom Technology.
A MIDDLE GROUND?
Although SAN may be better suited to the more complex networks of larger organisations, more vendors are seeing the individual solutions as a transitional step to a new storage paradigm, in which the solutions would work in combination.
"SAN and NAS solve two different problems, so I can see no reason why they cannot coexist," said Mr Anderson.
Mr Bovis agreed. "Today, there is a place for both," he said.
In his book The Holy Grail of data storage management, author John William Toigo also observed the SAN and NAS markets may yet evolve to provide a single network storage standard.
"Such an integration would be a step toward improving the scalability of NAS storage, while setting the stage for enterprise-wide storage infrastructure management via a back end SAN," he said.