2004
Big storage in smaller boxes
By
Ben King
Falling prices and new products are opening up the market
Financial Times,
17 November 2004
PA extract:
Alastair McAulay, managing consultant at PA Consulting, argues that Sans will make it so easy to add storage capacity, that IT managers may just deal with ballooning data by buying more disks, rather than addressing the issues of how data is sorted, searched and deleted.
"Getting the hardware is one thing but managing it can create more problems than it actually helps to solve, " says Mr McAulay. "The disk is the easy bit. Everything surrounding that is the hard bit."
Full article:
Sharp falls in the cost of hardware have made big business storage systems available to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). But cheap hardware does not. necessarily solve the problem of data overload.
One such SME is Hy-Tek, a 140-employee provider of materials handling systems, based in Columbus, Ohio. It had around 500 gigabytes (billion bytes) of data, including e-mail and computer-aided design (Cad) files. Stored across four locations on 13 different servers, it was becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to manage.
Large enterprises looking to resolve similar problems often turn to a storage area network (San), consolidating their storage onto a single hardware system, which handles the storage needs of all the different servers.
Bruce Dennis, IT manager at Hy-Tek, started looking at a San early in 2003."I looked at EMC, I looked at HP, I looked at IBM. But the price was out of our range, " he says.
But by September 2004, he was able to install an AX100, a SME-focused San from Dell and EMC, with data switching technology from Brocade and connectors from QLogic, which sells for a shade under Dollars 10,000 (Pounds 5,400).
Announced in May, it is one of a number of recent products which sharply lower the cost of storage technology for SMEs. In October, HP launched its own entry into the sub-Dollars 10,000 market, the StorageWorks MSA1000 Small Business SAN.
For many companies, the falling cost of San technology has brought previously unaffordable systems within their price range.
"The lowest price San three years ago was Dollars 55,000 (Pounds 30,000). Now you can build a San for under Dollars 10,000, " says Darren Thomas, vice-president and general manager of enterprise storage at Dell.
As with many IT systems, administration can be a bigger portion of the total cost of storage solutions than the price of hardware. So vendors have been working to make their low-end Sans easy to install and maintain for SME IT staffers, most of whom have no previous experience of working with San technology.
"You can build the AX100 into a San with four mouse clicks, " says Mr Thomas. At Hy-Tek, Mr Dennis' early experience of using the AX100 has been positive. "I had no previous San experience and I found it very easy to use, " he says.
This fall in the cost of San technology comes when many SMEs are finding the volumes of data they need to store mushrooming out of control. E-mail alone can take up enough room, but many SMEs are also implementing storage-hungry business software applications such as enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management.
Many SMEs are finding themselves forced to store more and more data by legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
However, Sans are not the only storage option open to SMEs. Other storage hardware, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS), is also getting cheaper. The age-old standards war between San and NAS appears to be fading, with many vendors offering both.
Proponents of San technology say it simplifies many of the headaches involved in storing data, improving the efficiency with which storage resources are allocated across an organisation.
However, for many companies a San is still too large and expensive. Sans can offer cost savings if a business can replace all the storage systems attached to separate servers, so they would only appeal to a company with multiple servers.
Some SMEs are even looking at storing data remotely. Frank Hirth, a London-based accountancy firm with 65 employees, has around 150GB of data to store. It uses a remote storage system called hSo:Vault. Every day data is uploaded from the company's servers to hSo's storage facility via a broadband link. "It has gone from being our data recovery solution to pretty much our main solution, " says Michael Jackson, IT manager at Frank Hirth.
SMEs are also expected to be fertile ground for a new form of San technology called iSCSI (internet small computer systems interface). This promises to remove the need for expensive pieces of hardware called host bus adapters, which connect servers to San switches.
It can be used with existing networks running on Internet Protocol (IP), which all IT managers will be familiar with, rather than the Fibre Channel protocol which is almost exclusively used in Sans.
"I believe you will see a lot more demand for IP networks from the SME space than you will in the enterprise, " says Mike Wytenus, senior director of marketing at EMC.
"It is definitely a good solution for SMEs, " says Robin Burke, vice-president at research company Gartner. "All the major vendors will have to have an iSCSI offering soon, if they don't already have
one."
Though storage hardware prices are falling fast enough to open the world of Sans to ever-smaller firms, it could be opening up serious data management problems as well. Alastair McAulay, managing consultant at PA Consulting, argues that Sans will make it so easy to add storage capacity, that IT managers may just deal with ballooning data by buying more disks, rather than addressing the issues of how data is sorted, searched and deleted.
There is a range of tools available to address this question. Some are too expensive for a SME, but prices for data management tools are falling. Whatever tools they choose, it is an issue that IT managers need to address.
The temptation with flexible storage hardware will be to add more capacity, rather than implement proper data management policies and lean on users to delete unnecessary e-mails in their inboxes.
"Getting the hardware is one thing but managing it can create more problems than it actually helps to solve, " says Mr McAulay. "The disk is the easy bit. Everything surrounding that is the hard bit."
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