From TechWeb:
Is Commoditization In Store For NAS?
(09/12/00, 8:56 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
The entrance of VA Linux Systems Inc. into the network-attached-storage market prompted renewed worries that commodity pricing pressures are moving into the storage-systems arena.
On Tuesday, VA Linux (stock: LNUX), Sunnyvale, Calif., introduced a lower-capacity 9205 product optimized both for cost and the Linux market, while new F840-class NAS products from Network Appliance Inc. (stock: NTAP), Sunnyvale, are focused towards larger ISPs, ASPs, and storage-server providers.
But some analysts also worried that the entrance of VA Linux into the NAS market was another indication that the same sort of commodity market dynamics that have plagued disk-drive vendors may infect providers of storage systems as well.
While manufacturers like Seagate Technology Inc. (stock: SEG), Scotts Valley, Calif., have survived by designing high-margin, high-capacity drives, other vendors like Western Digital Corp. (stock: WDC), Irvine, Calif., have suffered as price pressures have swallowed their margins.
In the NAS space, a new breed of second-tier players is attempting to strip down the NAS system to reduce cost, much like cost-optimized disk drives now dominate that market.
PowerVault 705N from Dell Computer Corp. (stock: DELL), Round Rock, Texas, is nothing more than a Dell-branded Quantum Snap 4100 server, and Compaq Computer Corp. (stock: CPQ), Houston, has adopted a stripped down version of Windows 2000 from Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT), Redmond, Wash., as a NAS operating system.
Officials at Compaq were unavailable for comment.
Adaptec Inc. (stock: ADPT), Milpitas, Calif., and CrosStor Software Inc., South Plainfield, N.J., also announced a partnership to merge SAN and NAS systems, enabling SAN-class performance on a commodity NAS infrastructure.
"If you look at the high end, companies like EMC are holding out on performance," said Stacey Quandt, analyst with GIGA Information Group, Santa Clara, Calif. "But in the low end, it's a commodity solution. Linux and VA Linux are challenging the value proposition."
VA Linux executives said they're taking aim against the EMC Corp. (stock: NIPNY) Tokyo, product line.
So far, they've only been able to hit the low end; VA Linux's new 9205 NAS box scales to 2.1 Gbytes, while the new NetApp F840 scales to 6 terabytes. A second F840c product from Network Appliance scales to 12 Tbytes.
Maintaining the company's revenue stream and profit margins is obviously key to Network Appliance's continued growth. According to International Data Corp., NetApp retained a dominant position in NAS revenue during 1999, with a market share of 45.9 percent.
The NAS market is forecast to grow from $850 million in 1999 to $6.57 billion in 2003, with a combined-annual growth rate of 66 percent.
At Network Appliance, the new F840 and F840c products are indicative of the company's desire to sell an "end-to-end solution," according to Mark Santora, senior vice-president of marketing at Network Appliance. Both the F840C and F840 ship with NetApp's operating system, Data ONTAP 6.0.
"The appliance is the software," Santora said. Referring to Compaq's use of the stripped-down Microsoft OS, Santora said, "you can't have an appliance based on a general-purpose OS. You need to build one from the ground up, that's designed to do one thing and one thing only, and do it well."
The NetApp F840 scales to 6 Tbytes of storage with a data throughput of up to 63 Mbits/s. Prices start at about $110,700, with 126 Gbytes of initial capacity.
The F840c, with integrated failover and active/active clustering, scales to 12 Tbytes of raw storage. Throughput is up to 123 Mbits/s. Prices start at $318,900 with 504 Gbytes initial capacity.
The VA Linux 9205, however, which GIGA's Quandt called a "commodity operating system running on top of commodity hardware," is designed to leverage the open-source Linux community.
VA Linux will provide access to the 9205 NAS software, which includes management, failover, data integrity, and backup options on the open-source SourceForge website.
"So by using the network of developers, we allow a much faster, innovative NAS solution," said Ali Jenab, senior vice-president and general manager of systems at VA Linux.
Analysts noted that VA Linux has successfully produced VA Cluster Manager (VACM), a collaborative effort to remotely manage clusters of Linux servers.
"If anybody can build a community, they can," said Pierre Fricke, analyst with D.H. Brown and Associates, Port Chester, N.Y.
The 9205 will scale up to 2.1 Tbytes in capacity with in a 2-U space, and customers can combine multiple 9205s in a single rack for a capacity of 10 terabytes.
The 9205, which costs $29,300 for 180 Gbytes of capacity, also supports RAID 5 data protection and will be generally available within the next 30 days.
Jenab claimed the 9205, which uses 73-Gbyte disk drives from Quantum Corp. (stock: DSS), Milpitas, will be about half the cost of a low-end VA Linux system.
The company expects to sell 600 terabytes worth of storage during VA Linux's current fiscal year, which began Aug. 1, Jenab said.
To a layman, the terms sound virtually identical; in reality, the difference between the two lines in the manner in which data is transferred, more than any hardware configuration.
An NAS system is usually a single storage unit that connects to the local-area network (LAN), typically serving files via a TCP/IP protocol over an Ethernet interface. A SAN is a collection of servers or storage devices, isolated from the LAN, which transfer blocks of data usually via a Fibre Channel interface.
SANs are typically used because of their superior performance, but their Achilles heel has been manageability, according to Mark Lohmeyer, marketing manager for Adaptec's Storage Networking Solutions Division.
Conversely, "the challenge for NAS has always been performance," he said.
The Adaptec/CrossStor partnership is designed to produce products by mid-2001 that transfer data either by block or by file, eliminating one of the fundamental differences between the two storage systems.
More importantly, however, the partnership is designed to allow high-performance block-data transfers over a commodity Ethernet interface.
"We want to be able to move data effectively over Ethernet, and this partnership is a great step forward to allow us to do that," Lohmeyer said. |
