Pulled this article from the NTAP thread, on NAS/SAN. Mentions QNTM/STK/NTAP/HWP and more. BTW, NTAP valuation now just under $19b, trading around 61. Had fallen to about $15b during the selloff last week.
Technology - Network-attached storage - Living on the edge.
Tony Harrington.
04/12/2000
Network News
Page 43
Copyright (C) 2000 VNU Business Publications Ltd.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have a bad reputation among storage purists, who see them
as a step backwards in the evolution of storage. They say companies should build storage strategies
that allow for a centralised view of their data, and that NAS devices pose the danger of creating
isolated islands of storage within the organisation. They also claim that NAS vendors' key claim for
their products - that they can be up and running within 15 minutes - is a sign of their weakness.
Why then, according to IDC and other industry analysts, is NAS set to play an increasing role within
organisations over the next few years, competing with that other buzzword technology, the San, for
their storage needs?
IDC points out that the client-server model has pushed the majority of disk-based storage capacity
away from centralised enterprise servers and out to the edges of the network. In this kind of
environment, as the hunger for storage grows, NAS appliance servers look like the harassed IT
manager's dream come true.
They don't require much maintenance and, unlike Storage Area Networking (San), they are TCP/IP
devices that operate on the existing Lan. Because of this there is no need to build a fibre channel
network to accommodate them.
Boarding the NAS gravy train
NAS appliances are fast and can move files around the network with ease.
Moreover, they can be added to a network without the need to take down application servers. Once a
NAS server is in place, it removes the storage load from the server which further improves
performance.
With so much going for NAS, it is not surprising to see vendors that have previously shunned the
market queuing up to announce product launches - everyone wants a slice of the NAS pie.
Hewlett-Packard (HP), for example, entered the NAS market about 18 months ago and is about to
launch a new NAS appliance server for NT. As David Smith, the company's business manager for
high-end automated libraries and NAS products explained: "NAS began life in the optical storage
side, then moved out into the hard disk server side as companies such as Network Appliance and
Auspex brought product to market".
This latest move by HP is just one more logical step along that path.
According to Smith, HP intends to follow the launch of its NT NAS server with a Unix-based NAS
system later this year. "This is a potentially huge market. It is projected to be worth some $10bn
by 2004, and we are seeing storage growing at around 50 per cent a year," he said.
Setting the sights
Smith noted that in its white paper Taming the Storage Growth Beast with NAS, IDC points out that
about 23 per cent of the mammoth $67bn server market is taken up purely by grunt file-serving
work. This chunk of the server market is a prime target for NAS vendors.
HP's strategy is to work with the operating system file structures to improve upon server-attached
storage. However, according to Network Appliance managing director Tim Pitcher, this misses half
the point. The advantage of a Network Appliance NAS server, he said, is that it switches off NT and
Unix file systems. It then uses its own file system to shift data around a network faster than either
operating system can manage on its own.
"If we did not have a better file system than NT or Unix we would lose a large part of our reason for
existing," he said.
The Network Appliance NAS server has a micro-kernel operating system that contains only
350,000 lines of code compared to the six million lines sitting on an NT Server. Full cluster
fail-over capabilities are implemented in the Network Appliance kernel in only 60 commands.
Pitcher said that because it switches off NT and Unix file system layers, his company's NAS can
span both Unix and NT environments and act as a data or document repository for servers running
either operating system.
Running on a single track
IDC analyst Richard Gray agreed: "File service applications compromise other complex, high-value
applications on the same server." When a general purpose operating system is running on a general
purpose server, the operating system architecture is not optimised for file serving, because it is
doing a clutch of other jobs at the same time.
Network Appliance is currently growing at 90 per cent a year, which exceeds the growth of the
general purpose server market - this is a useful indication of how demand for NAS technology is
growing. And major new trends in the market, such as the potential of e-business on mobile
devices, also play directly into the NAS space.
Pitcher said: "The mobile wireless appliance world is huge for us. If you open up the new Palm 7,
the back-end runs on Network Appliance servers.
Appliance servers also fit very well into the Point of Presence environment, where ISPs want a
lights-out environment that can be completely automated.
This is why we are doing business with nine out of 10 ISPs around the world.
"OS vendors are gradually being picked off by specialist appliances that perform far better than a
multi-functional OS. What this means is that they're expecting other specialised appliance devices
to eventually take chunks out of the operating system too," said Pitcher.
He pointed to Sun as a case in point: "Sun Solaris once had 50 per cent of the routing market. Now
the world goes to Cisco and others for specialist routers. Our business model is based on the likes of
Cisco."
He is critical, however, of the current trend for general storage vendors to rush their own NAS
appliance servers to market. "It takes two years just to build an appliance server. The idea that
every vendor can release a product with no development cycle at all is a joke," he said.
Selling points
Rob Melloy, marketing communications manager for Europe at Auspex, made a similar point. "The
NetOS operating system for our NAS servers is, in effect, what people are buying into when they
buy an Auspex NAS appliance.
We use standard Intel processors and commodity hard drives, so the differentiator has to be our
operating system," he said.
The Auspex FastFLO file system comes into its element with both low-level erratic file traffic and
when handling large file transfers. Because I/O requests do not pass through a complex operating
system, sequential I/O performance is enhanced. File layout optimisation and write clustering
techniques all help to minimise file fragmentation and speed up read operations.
Melloy admits that an Auspex NAS device can seem expensive when compared with a server from HP
or Dell, for example. However, he argues that the total cost of ownership benefits that are delivered
by centralising data on the Lan generates a strong value-for-money argument. "You are talking
about device servers that have close to zero maintenance, that are always on and that can scale as an
organisation's storage requirements increase," he said.
Melloy said that Auspex NAS servers can scale up to 9.1 Terabytes (TB) on a single footprint
server. Entry-level systems start at about GBP 60,000 for a 250GB device. He admits that the
price level sounds high, but argued that a NAS server is designed to be used by large numbers of
people in a work group.
One of the arguments against the NAS device is that it makes more sense to implement San
environments that will give an organisation a centralised storage platform that is independent of
both its servers and the Lan.
Centralisation problems
However, Melloy said that Sans still pose technological problems in comparison with the simplicity
of NAS. "Everyone is trying to figure out where the San concept goes and how far it goes. There are
storage and cost issues. NAS, however, is a proven product today, with defined protocols and a
defined task that works across both Unix and NT. That makes it a very attractive proposition," he
said.
He also argued that NAS and San technologies should be seen as complementary.
NAS servers can be backed up from the Lan either by giving each one its own dedicated tape devices
on the NAS I/O or, alternatively, they can be backed up to a San-based tape library.
Twin-track strategy
StorageTek European product marketing manager Mike Harper, agreed with Melloy that Sans and
NAS devices are complementary. He pointed out that while StorageTek is more focused on Sans, it
has a NAS hierarchical storage device - called Application Storage Manager - that is targeted at
database repositories. "Because the San sits between the server and the storage devices, a NAS
server can be located behind a San with a front-end connection to the TCP/IP Lan and a back-end
connection to the San purely for back-up," he said.
Ron McCloud, vice president for EMEA at switch vendor Vixel Corporation, is another who can see a
complementary role for San and NAS technologies.
Vixel has done a lot of work with Network Appliance to enable Lan-free back-ups of Network
Appliance NAS devices. However, he pointed out that integrating a Fibre Channel fabric switch so
that it understands the TPC/IP-oriented commands of a NAS device, allowing it to integrate the
back-end of that device into a San environment, is anything but trivial.
"Taking the back-up from the file server device and on to the San means that you take a huge amount
of traffic off the Lan, which pleases NAS users. However, it took a massive development effort,
working closely with Network Appliance , to get our 8100 switch working with just two San-based
tape vendors - Quantum ATL and Spectra Logic," he said.
Here to stay
McCloud says NAS has already established itself as a successful storage technology. "All you have to
do is look at the number of companies that have entered the NAS market. IBM and HP are already in
this market, Computer Associates has said it is interested and Quantum has produced an entry-level
product. There are opportunities outside the enterprise, particularly in the SoHo space, for a 'bolt
on', zero maintenance TCP/IP-based storage product that offers substantial scalability."
He pointed out that Quantum is already starting to address that area, with products starting at under
$1,000 (GBP 625) for a 10 to 15GB box. As Quantum and Spectra start looking to store video and
streaming media data, they are going to swamp server or PC-attached storage. "NAS represents the
logical answer," said McCloud.
EMC marketing director for the UK, Nigel Ghent, agreed that NAS devices have a bright future. He
pointed out that although EMC concentrates on its own proprietary centralised storage platform, it
has a NAS device, called Celerra, which is aimed at organisations, such as post-production houses,
that want to shift large files between workstations and servers.
However, Ghent stressed that NAS should not be seen as an isolated product.
"We would position a NAS device as part of an enterprise-level San. In that context, it solves
capacity problems instead of creating fresh issues," he said.
Network managers can take heart that if they are running low on server-attached storage, or if
they have a work group with specific needs. There is no need for them to agonise over the perfect
centralised product - NAS appliance server technology is a viable option. And the odds are that it
will integrate into the grand San scheme sooner rather than later. |
