Storage Mag Online April 2012

Also: StorAge 10 yeArS lAter | DiSk Drive ShortAge: FAct or Fiction? | StorAge For virtuAl ServerS | coping with Big DAtA | plenty oF choiceS For clouD

BAckup | get creAtive DeAling with DiSk iSSueS | nAS Still A StorAge mAinStAy

Integrating Cloud BackupYou can stick with your familiar backup app but still save

money by using the cloud as a backup target.

Managing the information that drives the enterprise

StorageVol. 11 No. 2 April 2012

From our SponSorS

Storage

3 Storage April 2012

A decade of storage

Disk drive

shortage: Fact or fiction?

Integrating

cloud backup

Storage for

virtual servers

Coping with

big data

Plenty of cloud backup choices

Get creative dealing with disk issues

NAS does the heavy lifting

Storage May 2010Copyright 2012, TechTarget. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher. For permissions or reprint information, please contact Mike Kelly, VP and Group Publisher ([email protected]).3

editorial | rich castagna

A decade of progress; or are we standing still?

There’s been plenty of technical innovation over the last 10 years, but in some cases,

we’re still struggling with the same old problems.

Happy birthday to us! last month marked the 10th anniversary of Storage magazine, and after blowing out the candles on a virtual birthday cake, i got to thinking about how much has happened storage-wise over those 10 years. So i dug out some old issues, figuring i’d do some “remember when” reminiscing while getting a chuckle out of how primitive we were back then.

i flipped the pages all the way back to may 2002—just the third issue of Storage—and prepared myself for a good laugh. the first story that caught my eye had the headline “remote Backup Ser-vices: the road not taken,” and included the line “getting remote workers to perform backups is like pulling teeth.” ha! that’s so . . . so . . . so much like today, actually. ten years ago storage manag-ers were fretting over protecting data at their companies’ outlying locations. today, there are far more technology alternatives, but the war is still being waged and few companies can boast a com-prehensive data backup operation that includes all company loca-tions. i’m not suggesting that there hasn’t been some progress, but it’s relatively modest, and with the new scourge of storage shops—smartphones and tablets—upon us, it’s not exactly a rosy picture.

mailto:mkelly%40techtarget.com?subject=

Storage


A decade of storage

Disk drive


Integrating

cloud backup

Storage for

virtual servers

Coping with

big data




4

Just a few months later, the mobile data protection issue reared its ugly head again. September 2002’s cover declared “Backup nightmare—what you can do about mobile computers.”

the June 2002 cover story was on storage virtualization, mainly about how it and storage managers were less than enthusiastic about implementing it. Apparently, they had a lot of reasons for avoiding the technology: “they cite a litany of ob-stacles, including a lack of standards, spotty in-teroperability, watered-down management func-tionality and the potential for showstopping support conflicts.” can you imag-ine that? well, maybe not so hard to imagine, since potential storage virtualizers face many of the same stumbling blocks today. But we’re making progress; our surveys tell us that approximately two-thirds of companies are at least dabbling with storage virtualization.

in that same issue there was an article that began “Buzzword alert: the latest word to loom from storage marketers’ lexicon is utility.” yikes! i think i used that same sentence to describe “cloud” in one of these columns. or was it “big data”? or maybe “compliance”? it’s good to see that we’ve improved on something in the past 10 years—the storage industry has elevated hype into an art form.

we kicked off our second year of existence with January 2003’s products of the year cover story. most of the award winners are still around in some shape or form, including gold winners Bro-cade, commvault, Fujitsu, nexsan and overland. in fact, Brocade was a gold winner in the 2011 products of the year competition.

we wrapped up 2003 with a December cover story reporting the

Look around your shop today, and if you’re lucky enough to have been there 10 years ago, you know it’s a very different place.

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A decade of storage

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results of our very first storage salary survey. the overall average salary for that year was $77,554. A lot of things haven’t changed over the years, but we’re happy to report that participants in the 2011 survey averaged $86,926. that’s slightly more than a 12% boost, which isn’t too shabby considering the mother of all recessions happened about midway between then and now. on the other hand, some things do remain the same, and we’re glad they do: 2012 will mark the 10th consecutive year we’ve surveyed storage professionals about their compensation.

my point isn’t that we haven’t made much progress in the last decade; it’s quite the opposite. look around your shop today, and if you’re lucky enough to have been there 10 years ago, you know it’s a very different place. And storage technology certainly hasn’t been on vacation; just look at the vocabulary of today’s headlines—solid-state, object, cloud, petabyte—and you know storage tech-nology hasn’t been standing still.

And yet, we’re still grappling with some of the same issues we tussled with last year and the year before and the year before that. the last feature story in the December 2003 issue of Storage was titled “Starting the ilm process.” ironically, few if any firms ever started the ilm process. But with a new name (auto-tiering) and a new urgency about it (solid-state storage), it’s suddenly in vogue.

maybe the bottom line is that technology can’t solve all storage problems. maybe a true solution is about the processes that are built around and support the technology, how the tech gets used, and how it integrates with other processes and technologies. By that measure, i’d say we’ve made considerable progress in the last 10 years. n

Rich Castagna is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.

5

mailto:rcastagna%40storagemagazine.com?subject=

http://www.hpmnetworks.com/

Storage


A decade of storage

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7

As you read this, disk drive supplies should have largely recovered from the horrendous floods that ended earlier this year in thailand, after 175 days of continuous monsoon.

Drive prices may also have come back down to earth. maybe.thailand is apparently the source for disk drives. Seagate man-

ufactures there, as does western Digital. As early as october 2011, both were predicting supply shortages throughout 2012 as a by-product of the floods. For the record, that was three months after the onset of the rain.

it took much less time after their announcements for drive prices to spike. integrators were complaining to me that the cost of disk drives had shot up 10 times by late october.

curiously, the drive shortage mantra they began back in octo-ber continues to be echoed by storage system and server vendors, and by “industry analysts” at gartner and iDc right up to the dead-line for this column—despite the fact that both Seagate and west-ern Digital have given the “all clear” signal.

let me back up a minute for those who haven’t paid attention to the news of the last few months. truth be told, you may have missed the back story on what happened in thailand. in the tech

storage revolutIOn | jon toigo

A drive dies . . . when will another one come?

The impact of the flooding in Thailand on the disk drive supply chain was certainly

real, but it looks like disk makers are spinning tales about shortages to justify price hikes.

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sector reporting i’ve been reading, there was hardly a mention of a massive monsoon, triggered by the landfall of tropical Storm nock-ten, that displaced 13.6 million people in thailand. there was no mention that the storm and floods had killed 815 people, that seven major industrial estates were swamped in 10 feet of wa-ter, or that the storm and flooding constituted the fourth most costly disaster in recorded history (surpassed only by Japan’s earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster last year, the 1995 kobe earthquake and hurricane katrina).

the headline in our tech industry press is that we’re all about to be majorly in-convenienced—end users by huge price increases on those SAtA disks we buy from Best Buy, compuSA, Fry’s and so on; while storage array ven-dors and pc makers will have to deal with drive supply shortages.

yet, quizzically, as i sit at my desk in my Florida office, staring at one array with a red light glowing on one bank of drive bays and at another where the drive light is completely dark (different representations of dead drives by different array vendors), i have been reviewing statements in the financial reports of the big two drive makers.

By november 28, 2011 (a month after its dismal preview of the coming year), Seagate reported that it would ship 43 million drives, which is only approximately 7 million below its high-end estimate. on January 4, 2012, the company reported it had shipped more disk drives in December than it had expected and would be reporting revenue in excess of its earlier guidance.

For its part, western Digital reported on october 17 that the floods would have “a significant impact on drive shipments and its ability to meet customer demand.” magically, the hitch was re-

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The headline in our tech industry press is that we’re all about to be majorly inconvenienced.

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solved “significantly ahead of expectations,” according to company spokespersons during the earnings call on January 23. the firm shipped approximately 29 million drives, which seems like a lot.

Both companies also reported earnings well in excess of oc-tober estimates. western Digital earned $1.51 per share (well be-yond the projected $0.65 per share) while Seagate earned $1.32 per share (topping its $1.08 per share estimate).

meanwhile, industry analysts at gartner and iDc haven’t deviat-ed from their doom and gloom forecasts, blaming drive shortages for everything from the decline of the pc market to slowdowns in it hardware spend-ing, which they continue to insist will dominate 2012. Better informa-tion is coming from wall Street analysts. During western Digital’s earn-ings call, one gutsy guy made the observation that the financial success of both Seagate and western Digital this quarter was likely a function of price gouging during an alleged supply shortage. when he asked western Digital bosses whether they thought such high margins were sustainable, they declined to comment.

For all the hate directed at wall Street these days, i kind of like this guy. unfortunately, his question continues to go unanswered. is the drive shortage manufactured to jack up prices? there’s little doubt there were some supply-chain interruptions due to the natural disaster in thailand, but the impact is still influencing the game today? Really?

9

Industry analysts at Gartner and IDC haven’t deviated from their doom and gloom forecasts, blaming drive shortages for everything from the decline of the PC market to slowdowns in IT hardware spending.

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A decade of storage

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perhaps everyone in the storage array food chain is using the popular theme of “thai floods creating supply shortages” just to gouge consumers? it’s been done before . . . too many times to count. remember the reports that came out after the last jump in gas prices, or after hurricanes Andrew or katrina, proving that everybody in the supply chain jumped on the bandwagon to raise their prices even though supplies were more than adequate? could this be another manifestation of the same disease?

i worry that it might be. i worry every time i read an article that proclaims a big increase in flash solid-state drive (SSD) uptake as they become “price competitive” with disk drives. or that certain array vendors are leveraging drive supply shortfalls to push ob-scenely overpriced deduplication or thin provisioning rigs.

meanwhile, two of my disk drives are dead. no way am i pay-ing a 400% markup for the same drives just because somebody is trying to make an extra buck on the backs of 800-plus dead thais. there, i said it. n

Jon William Toigo is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute.

10

mailto:jtoigo%40toigopartners.com?subject=

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1212

ClOuD SERvICES aDOPTIOn is growing, and last year’s tire-kick-ers are making real investments today. research from milford, mass.-based enterprise Strategy group (eSg) found that 74% of it departments will increase 2012 spending on public cloud com-puting services to help contain costs, while 63% plan to increase spending on server virtualization software or begin to build out a private cloud on top of their existing virtualized infrastructure (eSg research report, 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey, Janu-ary 2012).

LAuren WhITehouse

one of the most expedient ways to realize the economic benefits of cloud storage is to integrate your current backup or Dr operations with a cloud backup service.

cloudbackup

Integrated

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A decade of storage

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For many, the on-ramp to the cloud is the integration of on-premises functions with cloud infrastructure. A relatively easy “entry point” to cloud storage services is to integrate on-premises backup operations with a cloud-based service.

cloud-based storage and computing provide off-site, long-term storage and/or a disaster recovery (Dr) platform without having to fund/build one. organizations gain additional infrastructure assets, but at a fraction of the cost. the capital costs of equipment, as well as the operational costs of floor space, staff, energy, maintenance, software and equipment updates can be eliminated. redundancy to support business continuity (Bc) requirements is often inherent, without the additional costs typically expected in a do-it-yourself model.

cloud backup services can be used to capture and store backup copies to replace a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2t) approach while au-tomatically storing backup sets off-site. the same services can of-ten be used to store replicated instances of production workloads for cloud-based Dr (see “integrating with cloud Dr services”).

For backup and recovery functions, there’s a spectrum of cloud integration approaches available (see “cloud backup integration models”). one tactic that actually eliminates on-site backup infra-structure is backup software as a service (SaaS), which involves running the backup application and storing backup copies in the cloud. Another infrastructure elimination approach is to outsource it services to a managed service provider (mSp), allowing the mSp to host production applications and manage it infrastructure, in-cluding backup and recovery operations. there are also multiple ways to integrate on-premises backup functions with the cloud via a disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2c) approach: leveraging a public cloud infrastructure as a service (iaaS), creating a virtual private cloud in a public cloud environment or developing a private cloud infrastructure.

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http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-storage-service

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tutorial/Cloud-backup-tutorial-How-to-leverage-cloud-backup-services

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LeverAging A pubLic cLoud infrAstructureA D2D2c approach with a public cloud infrastructure involves us-ing an on-premises backup application that directly or indirectly integrates with iaaS vendors, such as Amazon, google, microsoft, nirvanix, rackspace and others, via the iaaS vendor’s published Api. the Apis often support representational state transfer (reSt) running over http. Backup vendors that support Apis directly write natively into a cloud service. vendors such as Actifio, AppAssure (acquired by Dell), Arkeia, cA, commvault, Druva, Symantec (net-Backup and Backup exec) and Zmanda have done the heavy lifting to integrate their backup apps so they can commu-nicate with other vendors’ cloud-based services. this eliminates the need for it organizations to do com-plex scripting or employ cloud gateway appliances to integrate with the cloud services. however, users may need to purchase an add-on “cloud connector” or update me-dia agents to the latest service pack to be compatible with a cloud storage provider’s infrastructure.

As an alternative to per-cloud integration via Apis, some backup vendors take advantage of cloud gateways for integration. Backup apps that don’t speak in reSt interfaces can use the cloud as a storage repository via the use of a cloud gateway, such as those from ctera networks, F5 networks, nasuni, panzura, riverbed, StorSimple or twinStrata. For example, an on-premises riverbed whitewater appliance can be deployed as a local storage target for the in-house backup application. it provides local deduplicated storage and automatic wide-area network (wAn)-optimized repli-cation of data to a public cloud, including At&t Synaptic Storage,

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As an alternative to per-cloud integration via APIs, some backup vendors take advantage of cloud gateways for integration.

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A decade of storage

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Amazon, microsoft Azure, nirvanix and rackspace. Some of the backup vendors implementing this form of cloud integration include cA, commvault, iBm, Quest, Symantec and veeam.

while the purchase of a cloud storage gateway appliance is an

15

if disaster recovery (Dr) is the primary use case for using cloud services, there are a few scenarios to consider. A cloud can serve as a cold, warm or hot standby site.

• Coldstandby implementations maintain off-site copies of data on storage and can make available the infrastructure needed for “bare-metal” recovery, enabling recovery time within hours to days of an interruption at the primary site. using cloud-based virtual machines (vms) accelerates re-covery time over acquiring, deploying and configuring physi-cal equipment and restoring data.

• Warmstandby approaches maintain replicated systems in a dormant state, enabling recovery time objectives to within minutes to hours of an outage. virtual machine images that encapsulate the operating system, application, data and configuration settings make it simpler to synchronize be-tween the primary and cloud-based warm standby site. in the event of a disaster, vms are activated on demand and failover to an instance of the application occurs.

• Hotstandby is a scenario where applications and data are maintained off-site in a running state, enabling the most rapid recovery—usually within seconds to minutes. the hot site can immediately take over operations in the event of a primary site failure.

the tradeoff as you go up the recovery site temperature scale is cost and, often, complexity.

integrating with cloud dr services

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-storage-gateway

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added cost, it can provide greater flexibility in iaaS vendor selec-tion. this type of implementation, however, does have some draw-backs. First, it organizations may have to adjust deduplication, compression and encryption settings. Deduplication, compression and encryption performed by the backup application itself would be redundant to the services offered by a gateway appliance like riverbed’s. Also, retention settings for local and cloud storage are typically configured at the gateway appliance—and not at the backup application—which can introduce a layer of management complexity. lastly, the backup application only sees the gateway device as the local storage repository; it’s not aware of copies rep-licated by the gateway appliance to the cloud tier, a situation that can delay recovery if the backup application requests data that resides only in the cloud.

virtuAL privAte cLoud integrAtionFor it organizations that have concerns about the performance and/or security of using the shared infrastructure of a public cloud but still want the economic and scalability benefits, a virtual pri-vate cloud (vpc) implementation may be more appropriate. A vpc exists within a shared or public cloud, and links cloud services with corporate-owned and -operated computing resources, but typi-cally offers enterprise-grade security and performance. this option provides the privacy and reliability of dedicated resources with the rapid scalability and cost benefits of a shared-service model. the availability of a vpc will vary from one service provider’s iaaS platform to the next.

A variation of a vpc approach is also offered by some mSps that have developed iaaS that’s based on on-premises-compatible technologies. Several backup vendors taking the non-public cloud stance in favor of mSp enablement include Actifio, emc, FalconStor, iBm, netApp, Symantec, Syncsort, veeam and vmware. in this sce-nario, the service provider receives its tenant’s backups directly

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17 STORaGE April 201217

Cloud backup integration models

Primary Data

Backup Server

Backup Storage

Policy and Infrastructure Management

Primary Data

Policy Management

Shared Compute

Shared Storage

Infrastructure Management

Primary Data

Backup Server

Backup Storage


Shared Compute

Shared Storage


Primary Data

Backup Server

Backup Storage


Shared Compute

Shared Storage


Primary Data

Backup Server

Backup Storage


Shared Compute

Shared Storage


Primary Data

Backup Server

Backup Data


aPIs

aPIs

tenant/Subscriber Infrastructure Service Provider/Cloud InfrastructureOn-premises Backup•perpetually licensed backup software•Dedicated on-site infrastructure•managed locally

Backup SaaS•Subscription service•Shared off-site infrastructure•cloud-based backup application

D2D2C—PublicCloud•perpetually licensed backup software•Dedicated on-site infrastructure•managed locally•Additional off-site copy on shared off-site storage accessed via Apis

D2D2C—virtual Private Cloud•perpetually licensed backup software•Dedicated on-site infrastructure•managed locally•Additional off-site copy on “virtually private” shared off-site storage

D2D2C—Private Cloud•perpetually licensed backup software•Dedicated on-site and/or shared off-site corporate infrastructure

•managed locally

Managed Services•perpetually licensed software•Dedicated off-site infrastructure•managed by third party from or at an off-site location

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and maintains them on like infrastructure. For example, iland, an mSp, offers a hosted Dr solution for vmware vSphere virtual ma-chines based on veeam Backup & replication. Similarly, verizon terremark partners with netApp to build out a cloud-based, multi-tenant backup solution based on netApp’s storage systems and data protection portfolio. emc’s cloud strategy is based on a simi-lar model to deliver remote and replicated backup services. emc mSps use emc Data Domain or emc Avamar at the subscriber’s site for local protection, and replicate copies to multi-tenant configu-rations of emc Data Domain or emc Avamar at the mSp’s site for cloud copies.

creAting A privAte cLoudcompanies that want the scalability and economic benefits of a shared infrastructure, and to maintain full custody and con-trol of their corporate assets, may choose to develop a private cloud infrastructure. A private cloud infrastructure is intended for a single organization, but it delivers on-demand network access to a shared pool of elastic it resources just like a public cloud. in this case, corporate sites use local, perpetually licensed backup apps to perform backup tasks and store backup data in the off-site private cloud. most backup vendors’ products are based on multi-tenant architectures and can be used in private cloud implemen-tations. Furthermore, several backup vendors are integrating with vmware vcloud Director in anticipation of its role in private and mSp-enabled clouds.

singLe-vendor integrAted bAckupcloud integration for backup is greatly simplified when the on-premises technology and cloud iaaS come from the same vendor, such as with evault and Sungard Availability Services. with these implementations, on-premises software or an all-in-one backup appliance provides local protection, and off-site replication to the

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http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Creating-a-private-cloud-Architecture-and-building-blocks

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Creating-a-private-cloud-Architecture-and-building-blocks

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vendor’s cloud facilitates disaster recovery. Sungard’s recover-2cloud for Server replication replicates physical and virtual sys-tems to the cloud, while recover2cloud for vaulting copies backup sets to the Sungard cloud. evault plug-n-protect is an on-premises appliance that combines with evault offsite replication Service, which replicates the on-site “vault” to the evault cloud to create a cloud-integrated solution. in addition to the “one throat to choke” benefits of dealing with a single vendor for an end-to-end solution, what stands out with these vendors is that they also offer recov-ery services where teams at the cloud data center can facilitate recovery in the cloud infrastructure.

recovery in tHe cLoudintegrating on-site backup with public, private or virtual private clouds is only feasible if uplink bandwidth is sufficient. A daily incremental backup of a 100 gB of data at a 10 mbps transfer rate could take nearly 24 hours to complete. upgrading to a 100 mbps connection reduces transfer time significantly to a little more than two hours; however, bandwidth costs are often doubled. that’s why it’s impor-tant to take advantage of bandwidth optimization features, such as deduplication and compression. the only “gotcha” is that data in a deduplicated or compressed state in the cloud still has to be “reconstituted” and restored to be recognized by the production application. the data isn’t in a usable state for a cloud-based Dr scenario and there could be a time delay if a bulk transfer of data from cloud storage needs to occur for on-site recovery either over a bandwidth connection or via shipped portable media.

one remedy to this dilemma is to recover in the cloud. imple-menting a D2D2c strategy for a whole system in the cloud—not

Integrating on-site back-up with public, private or virtual private clouds is only feasible if uplink bandwidth is sufficient.

http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/Disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud-explained

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just the data—improves recovery time objectives. For subscribers who have virtualized workloads at their primary site, this scenario is straightforward. the portability of a virtual machine encapsulat-ing an application instance streamlines whole system backup and recovery processes. nearly all backup vendors support backup and recovery of virtual systems, so it’s just a matter of contracting for the compatible cloud resources to create a failover site.

Some vendors, namely Arkeia and Zmanda, offer a virtual backup appliance. this allows customers to run the backup server in the cloud and replicate data between the on-premises backup server and the cloud-based one. Data can be restored in the cloud or the cloud storage can be mounted for on-premises backup services. other products such as AppAssure and Symantec Backup exec can perform recoveries in the cloud. Symantec’s solution is limited to virtual environments, but AppAssure can protect both physical and virtual systems. replication between the on-premises AppAs-sure backup server and an AppAssure core instance running in the Amazon elastic compute cloud (ec2) makes it possible to recover in the cloud on demand. the ability to run the backup application in the cloud also helps organizations protect cloud-resident produc-tion applications.

cloud infrastructure offers tremendous advantages to reduce costs and simplify recovery operations, especially for integrated backup. the on-demand, pay-as-you-go characteristics of cloud storage services are a perfect match for the D2D2c use cases for reducing or eliminating tape media and facilitating disaster recovery. n

LaurenWhitehousehasmorethan25yearsofexperiencecoveringbackupandreplication, and other data protection technologies.

Server Virtualization: Dream for server admins...

NightmareGet your virtual environment under control.

Check out our Top 10 Server Virtualization Tips for storage managers:www.SearchStorage.com/Server_Virtualization

for storage pros.

Storage April 2012

A decade of storage

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Integrating

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2222

StorAge mAnAgement hAS developed into a discipline in its own right, driven by the growth of data and the emergence of standards such as Fibre channel (Fc), iScSi and nFS, which have enabled the centralization and standardization of storage systems.

As virtualization has become the main technology for server and desktop optimization, storage has been a key component in delivering highly scalable virtualized solutions. without centralized storage, certain features such as nondisruptive virtual machine (vm) migration wouldn’t have been possible.

servers It can still be a struggle at times, but managing storage in virtual server environments is better understood today, with tighter integration and more effective management tools available.

By ChrIs evAns

Managing for

storage virtual

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Virtual-machine-migration-FAQ-Live-migration-P2V-and-more

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Virtual-machine-migration-FAQ-Live-migration-P2V-and-more

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however, while storage has provided significant benefits, it also poses new challenges for both storage and virtualization admin-istrators. virtualization adds another layer of complexity in under-standing the relationship between a server and the storage it uses. that layer of abstraction makes it difficult to translate storage-centric concepts such as logical unit numbers (luns), rAiD groups and disks into virtual objects such as virtual hard disks (vhDs) and virtual machine disks (vmDks). Storage administrators need to take a new approach when delivering storage to virtual environments.

tHe cHALLengesvirtualization creates new operational headaches. Because many vms can exist on a single storage lun, the i/o profile of virtual servers and desktops tends to be more random and unpredict-able in nature. the functionality of today’s hypervisors enables large amounts of i/o to be generated when moving virtual ma-chines around the storage infrastructure through the use of fea-tures such as vmware inc.’s Storage vmotion and microsoft corp.’s hyper-v live migration. virtualization may also impact heavily on storage utilization, as virtual machines are copied, cloned or other-wise replicated across the environment.

we must also consider the operational structures that have been built up in many large organizations. As it infrastructure has grown, the component technologies have tended to split into silos covering the disciplines of storage, networking, servers and data-bases. once, it was possible for storage admins to go about their business with little regard for the operation of other parts of the infrastructure. But virtualization has changed that world and made it necessary for those isolated silos to integrate like never before.

cHoosing A strAtegyefficient storage management in virtual environments entails meeting two basic metrics: capacity and performance. while this

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http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Storage-management-for-virtualized-servers

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could also be said of nonvirtualized environments, performance is the primary consideration in virtual storage designs as it has more of an impact on the opera-tion of a virtual infrastruc-ture. Slow response times from a single lun are like-ly to affect only a single host in nonvirtualized en-vironments; however, poor responses from a large lun supporting many vir-tual machines can have a much wider impact. this is especially so with a virtual desktop infrastructure (vDi). there are a number of strategies a storage administrator should consider.

use HArdwAre AcceLerAtion And Apismany vendors (including the top six storage vendors: Dell inc., emc corp., hewlett-packard [hp] co., hitachi Data Systems, iBm and netApp inc.) today support hardware acceleration of virtualization i/o. this is implemented through Api interfaces in the hypervisor, such as vStorage Apis for Array integration (vAAi). vAAi offloads some of the “heavy lifting” from the hypervisor by letting the stor-age array choose the best way to perform key operations, such as sub-lun locking, bulk copying and zeroing out ranges of data. most recently, in vSphere 5, vmware added the thin reclaim feature, which lets the hypervisor release deleted storage from thin provi-sioned luns without directly writing data to deleted blocks.

offloading storage management tasks to the array provides numerous benefits. First, it reduces the workload on the hypervi-sor, lessening the cpu load and traffic across the storage network. Second, it lets the storage array optimize and prioritize i/o-inten-sive operations that may be best achieved internally within the

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efficient storage management in virtual environments entails meeting two basic metrics: capacity and performance.

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array. As the leading hypervisor vendor, vmware has developed a number of Apis, including vStorage Apis for Data protection (vADp) and vStorage Apis for Storage Awareness (vASA). vASA is of in-creasing importance in the delivery of scalable storage environ-ments, providing configuration information to the hypervisor about storage luns, including replication and performance metrics.

configure for performAncewhen delivering i/o to virtual environments, performance is every-thing. typically, virtual environments create more random work-loads, making the work of optimizing i/o workloads much harder for the array. there are techniques that can be employed to en-sure performance is delivered optimally, including:

• Wide striping. this involves spreading i/o across as many physical disk spindles as possible. wide striping can be achieved by using large rAiD groups (being mindful of rebuild times for disk failures) or by concatenating rAiD groups into storage pools. this technique is applicable to both file- and block-based storage platforms.

• Dynamic tiering. like any storage environment, virtual serv-ers will have i/o “hotspots,” data that generates a large pro-portion of the i/o workload. hotspot areas can be difficult to predict, so platforms that offer dynamic tiering provide an au-tomated way to ensure the hottest data stays on the fastest disk. this technique is particularly useful where virtual ma-chines have been cloned from a single master image.

use tHin provisioningit’s very easy for storage in virtual environments to grow out of control, as virtual machines are relatively easy to create. this is especially true in on-demand environments. thin provisioning en-

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http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/guides/Top-5-tips-on-virtual-server-storage-and-storage-for-virtual-environments

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sures that disk space is consumed only by data that’s written to the disk by the host, rather than reserving a fixed image for each vm. the feature can be implemented in the hypervisor and is a common option with most storage platforms.

use vendor pLug-insAlmost all enterprise and midrange storage platforms offer plug-ins for centralized management tools like vmware vcenter. this provides a “single-pane-of-glass” view of both virtual servers and storage, in many cases allowing the storage to be configured di-rectly from the vcenter console. in organizations without dedi-cated storage teams, this can significantly reduce the work of an it administrator.

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here are some suggested best practices for managing storage for virtual server environments:

• Configure storage for performance, then capacity.

• use performance-enhancing features such as wide striping.

• Deploy storage that uses the hardware acceleration via Apis.

• Don’t use traditional backup methods for virtual machines; look for snapshots and third-party software that use hypervisor backup Apis.

• use vendor plug-ins to management frameworks such as vmware vcenter and microsoft System center virtual machine manager (Scvmm).

• Consider custom solutions.

• Move toward automation.

best practices: VMs and storage

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storAge buiLt for virtuAL serversA number of startup storage vendors have rolled out hardware and software storage solutions specifically designed for virtual server environments. these include Atlantis computing inc., Solid-Fire, tintri inc. and virsto Software. in essence these products are architected to address the issues described here, including ran-dom i/o challenges.

in addition to plug-ins for virtualization management tools, there are a number of storage and third-party vendor tools to consider. Some examples include:

• EMCCorp.VirtualStorageIntegrator(VSI). this vmware vcenter plug-in from emc provides a rich range of storage information directly within the vcenter console and can in-tegrate with citrix XenDesktop in virtual desktop infrastruc-ture (vDi) environments.

• iWaveSoftwareLLCStorageAutomator. iwave’s Storage Automator allows policy-based deployment of storage for virtual environments, managing the workflow processes of delivering virtual servers in public cloud-type environments.

• NetAppInc.SANscreenVMInsight. netApp’s SAnscreen platform provides storage visualization, with integration into vmware virtualcenter, operating on netApp or hetero-geneous storage configurations.

• SolarWindsStorageManager. Solarwinds has a variety of tools that both visualize and help in the optimization of storage for virtual environments, including virtual machine to storage mapping.

sampler: Vendor tools for managing storage for VMs

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AutomAte itmanaging dynamically changing virtual environments to optimize capacity and performance can be a time-consuming process. As virtual environments scale and mature, there’s a need to move to-ward more automation of manual optimization processes. hyper-visor vendors are starting to include capabilities in their products that allow some of these features to be semi-automated, reducing the onus on the administrator to continually tune the storage envi-ronment. in vSphere 5, vmware introduced Storage Distributed re-source Scheduler (SDrS), which provides some degree of automation of storage allocations. SDrS provides automated ini-tial placement of vmDks, automated migrations of virtual machines to meet capacity and performance goals, as well as affin-ity rules, ensuring, for example, that high i/o virtual machines are placed on separate hardware.

the move to more automated storage management will be an absolute requirement as virtual infrastructures scale and become more service orientated in their delivery. Already, storage vendors are coming to the market with new products that provide provi-sioning Apis to hook directly into virtual server automation.

don’t forget bAckupBackup always seems to be treated as a poor relation in storage management; however, it’s of vital importance for delivering high-availability storage environments. in virtual infrastructures, tradi-tional backup solutions aren’t the most efficient way to back up and restore data, and other techniques can be used to optimize

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As virtual environments scale and mature, there’s a need to move toward more automation of manual optimization processes.

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/How-to-design-a-virtualization-infrastructure-that-scales

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the backup and restore process.in block storage deployments, traditional backups use the host

itself to back up data. this is because the storage array has no awareness of the format of data on a lun. the host places the file system onto the lun, so the backup software relies on the host to provide a stream of files for backup.

on all virtual platforms, a vm is stored as a file or series of files, even when using block-based storage arrays. this makes the backup process easier, as backups can be taken simply by taking a copy of the files that make up the virtual machine.

Some hypervisor vendors, such as vmware, offer Apis that allow third-party software to view changed block data within the virtual machine itself, providing a highly efficient way of backing up only those files that have changed since the last backup was taken. All hypervisor vendors also provide the ability to snapshot virtual ma-chines. Although this results in a “crash consistent” copy, in some instances, with agent software, the snapshots can be coordinated with quiescing the host file system to allow consistent snapshots to be taken.

storAge tooLs wiLL evoLveStorage continues to be a key feature in deploying scalable virtual infrastructures. As these environments scale and mature, stor-age administrators will need to employ tools and techniques such as automation and visualization software that will allow them to meet the challenges of an ever integrated it world. n

ChrisEvansisaUK-basedstorageconsultant.Hemaintains“TheStorage Architect”blog.

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/Hypervisor-vendors-advancing-data-storage-management-capabilities

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Find out the benefits, drawbacks and functions of this technology with ourTop 10 Tips on Data Deduplication:

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Data Deduplication:Fad, fixture... or just a nice feature?

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“ Big DAtA” reFerS to data sets that are too large to be captured, handled, analyzed or stored in an appropriate timeframe using traditional infrastructures. Big is, of course, a term relative to the size of the organization and, more importantly, to the scope of the it infrastructure that’s in place. Big data also infers analysis, driven by the expectation that there’s value in all the information businesses are accumulating—if there was just a way to pull that value out.

perhaps it follows from the notion that storage capacity is cheap, but in the effort to cull business intelligence from the

data Big data analytics will place new burdens on storage systems. here are some of the key features those systems will need to meet the challenges of big data.

By erIC sLACk

storage for

big

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Big-Data-Senior-News-Director-Dave-Raffos-take

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mountains of new data created every day, organizations are saving more of it. they’re also saving data that’s already been analyzed, which could potentially be used for trending against future data collections.

wHy big, wHy now?Aside from the ability to keep more data than ever before, we have access to more types of data. these data sources include internet transactions, social networking activity, automated sensors, mo-bile devices and scientific instrumentation, among others. in addi-tion to static data points, transactions can create a certain “veloc-ity” to this data growth. As an example, the extraordinary growth of social media is generating new transactions and records. But the availability of ever-expanding data sets doesn’t guarantee success in the search for business value.

dAtA is now A fActor of productionData has become a full-fledged factor of production, like capital, labor and raw materials, and it’s not just a requirement for organi-zations with obscure applications in special industries. companies in all sectors are combining and comparing more data sets in an effort to lower costs, improve quality, increase productivity and create new products. For example, analyzing data supplied directly from products in the field can help improve designs. or a company may be able to get a jump on competitors through a deeper analy-sis of its customers’ behavior compared with that of a growing number of available market characteristics.

storAge must evoLveBig data has outgrown its own infrastructure and it’s driving the development of storage, networking and compute systems de-signed to handle these specific new challenges. Software require-

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ments ultimately drive hardware functionality and, in this case, big data analytics are impacting the development of data storage infrastructures.

this could mean an opportunity for storage and it infrastruc-ture companies. As data sets continue to grow with both struc-tured and unstructured data, and analysis of that data gets more diverse, current storage system designs will be less able to meet the needs of big data. Storage vendors have begun to respond with block- and file-based systems designed to accommodate many of these requirements. here’s a listing of some of the characteristics big data storage infrastructures need to incorporate to meet the challenges presented by big data.

Capacity. “Big” often translates into petabytes of data, so big data stor-age systems certainly need to be able to scale. But they also need to scale easily, adding capacity in modules or arrays transparently to users, or at least without taking the sys-tem down. Scale-out storage is becoming a popular alternative for this use case. Scale-out’s clustered architecture features nodes of storage capacity with embedded processing power and connec-tivity that can grow seamlessly, avoiding the silos of storage that traditional systems can create.

Big data also means a large number of files. managing the ac-cumulation of metadata for file systems at this level can reduce scalability and impact performance, a situation that can be a prob-lem for traditional nAS systems. object-based storage architec-tures, on the other hand, can allow big data storage systems to

Big data has outgrown its own infrastructure and it’s driving the development of storage, networking and compute systems designed to handle these specific new challenges.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Understanding-Big-Data-analytics

http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/tip/Scale-out-storage-options-increasing-with-software-based-systems

http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/tip/Object-storage-Object-based-storage-devices-challenge-file-systems-for-unstructured-data-sets

http://searchstoragechannel.techtarget.com/tip/Object-storage-Object-based-storage-devices-challenge-file-systems-for-unstructured-data-sets

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expand file counts into the billions without suffering the overhead problems that traditional file systems encounter. object-based storage systems can also scale geographically, enabling large infrastructures to be spread across multiple locations.

Latency. Big data may also have a real-time component, espe-cially in use cases involving web transactions or finance. For ex-ample, tailoring web advertising to each user’s browsing history requires real-time analytics. Storage systems must be able grow to the aforementioned proportions while maintaining performance because latency can produce “stale data.” here, too, scale-out architectures enable the cluster of storage nodes to increase in processing power and connectivity as they grow in capacity. ob-ject-based storage systems can parallelize data streams, further improving throughput.

many big data environments will need to provide high iopS per-formance, such as those in high-performance computing (hpc) en-vironments. Server virtualization will drive high iopS requirements, just as it does in traditional it environments. to meet these chal-lenges, solid-state storage devices can be implemented in many different formats, from a simple server-based cache to all-flash-based scalable storage systems.

access. As companies get better at understanding the potential of big data analysis, the need to compare differing data sets will bring more people into the data sharing loop. in the quest to create business value, firms are looking at more ways to cross-reference different data objects from various platforms. Storage infrastruc-tures that include global file systems can help address this issue, as they allow multiple users on multiple hosts to access files from many different back-end storage systems in multiple locations.

security. Financial data, medical information and government intelligence carry their own security standards and requirements. while these may not be different from what current it managers

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must accommodate, big data analytics may need to cross-refer-ence data that may not have been co-mingled in the past, which may create some new security considerations.

Cost. “Big” can also mean expensive. And at the scale many organizations are operating their big data environments, cost containment will be an im-perative. this means more efficiency “within the box,” as well as less expensive components. Storage de-duplication has already entered the primary stor-age market and, depend-ing on the data types in-volved, could bring some value for big data storage systems. the ability to re-duce capacity consump-tion on the back end, even by a few percentage points, can provide a significant return on investment as data sets grow. thin provi-sioning, snapshots and clones may also provide some efficiencies depending on the data types involved.

many big data storage systems will include an archive com-ponent, especially for those organizations dealing with historical trending or long-term retention requirements. tape is still the most economical storage medium from a capacity/dollar standpoint, and archive systems that support multiterabyte cartridges are be-coming the de facto standard in many of these environments.

what may have the biggest impact on cost containment is the use of commodity hardware. it’s clear that big data infrastructures won’t be able to rely on the big iron enterprises have traditionally turned to. many of the first and largest big data users have devel-oped their own “white-box” systems that leverage a commodity-

Many big data storage systems will include an archive component, especially for those organizations dealing with historical trending or long-term retention requirements.

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oriented, cost-saving strategy. But more storage products are now coming out in the form of software that can be installed on exist-ing systems or common, off-the-shelf hardware. in addition, many of these companies are selling their software technologies as commodity appliances or partnering with hardware manufacturers to produce similar offerings.

persistence. many big data applications involve regulatory compliance that dictates data be saved for years or decades. medi-cal information is often saved for the life of the patient. Financial information is typically saved for seven years. But big data users are also saving data longer because it’s part of an historical record or used for time-based analysis. this requirement for longevity means storage manufacturers need to include on-going integrity checks and other long-term reliability features, as well as address the need for data-in-place upgrades.

Flexibility. Because big data storage infrastructures usually get

an example of value creation from “big data” is internet and social media. companies like Facebook are mining their users’ personal preferences and creating profiles that can show ad-vertisers which products they’re most interested in, thus increasing ad revenue.

not to be outdone, google recently announced a change in its privacy policies, informing the public that it will begin more aggressive cross-referencing of the data collected within its businesses. essentially, google is going to use data from google searches, gmail accounts, Android users’ activity, plus data from youtube and its other websites to gain insights into user behavior. this translates into improved advertising effec-tiveness and increased revenue.

big data big shots: Facebook and Google

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very large, care must be taken in their design so they can grow and evolve along with the analytics component of the mission. Data migration is essentially a thing of the past in the big data world, especially since data may be in multiple locations. A big data stor-age infrastructure is essentially fixed once you begin to fill it, so it must be able to accommodate different use cases and data scenarios as it evolves.

application awareness. Some of the first big data implemen-tations involved application-specific infrastructures, such as sys-tems developed for government projects or the white-box systems invented by large internet services companies. Application aware-ness is becoming more common in mainstream storage systems as a way to improve efficiency or performance, and it’s a technol-ogy that should apply to big data environments.

smaller users. As a business requirement, big data will trickle down to organizations that are much smaller than what some storage infrastructure marketing departments may associate with big data analytics. it’s not only for the “lunatic fringe” or oddball use cases anymore, so storage vendors playing in the big data space would do well to provide smaller configurations while fo-cusing on the cost requirements. n

EricSlackisasenioranalystatStorageSwitzerland.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/application-aware-storage

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/application-aware-storage

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hot spots | jason buffington

Lots of choices for cloud backup

The oldest cloud storage services have matured into a variety of data

protection offerings that can meet the needs of most enterprises.

“Get your data out of the building” is the best advice i can give about data protection, and it’s the part of the process many orga-nizations still struggle with. too many companies fall short when a crisis hits because they were either still planning or had made their data protection “solution” so convoluted that it failed when they tried to put it into use.

bAckup As A servicewith all the talk about “the cloud,” cloud backup—or backup as a service (BaaS)—seems like a natural solution to the problem of getting data off-site. it may be true in some cases, but you need to be very clear on a few key points:

• recognize that your primary business motivation in considering a service-based model is to reduce the operational implications of backup. the good news is that you won’t have to manage it nearly as much. the bad news is that you don’t get to man-age it, so be prepared for new interfaces, installation methods, schedules and so on.

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• understand that backing up to the cloud is relatively easy, but recovering from the cloud is less so. your recovery goals should be well defined, and you may want to consider some sort of re-covery device that can expedite recoveries rather than stream-ing data over the internet.

• Acknowledge that no one is as invested in your recovery as you are. if you can’t recover what you need when you need it, your cloud provider just loses a cus-tomer while you may lose your job or business. So testing that’s even more rigorous than you’d do with a traditional on-premis-es solution is essential.

cloud-based backup can solve some great problems for a po-tentially large segment of the it world, but like any new architec-ture, it isn’t for everyone. you should approach it with the same diligence, evaluation and assessment as you would for any other business-impacting it project.

use tHe cLoud As bAckup mediAtraditional on-premises backup vendors haven’t ignored their cus-tomers’ interest in cloud-based backup, nor do they underesti-mate the need to get your data out of the building. many of them have long offered replication from a backup server to a secondary backup server at a different location. that works very well, as long as you have two locations with it support at both.

But some backup vendors use the cloud simply as another form of media. that means that after deploying your typical backup in-frastructure, you can restore from disk-based media, tape media

understand that backing up to the cloud is relatively easy, but recover-ing from the cloud is less so.

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or from the cloud. in some cases, that third tier is maintained at the vendor’s data center(s); in others, the application uses a public storage cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon web Services (AwS).

For many, this is an attractive alternative. if your current backup app already supports cloud-based storage as a media layer, then all your agents stay as they are. your existing backup server(s) remain in place to perform fast recoveries from local storage and you now have an additional copy of your data out of the building. (read our feature on “integrated cloud backup.”)

wHen your dAtA’s ALreAdy in tHe cLoudBoth BaaS and hybrid cloud approaches are based on the assump-tion that your production data is on your premises (or with your mobile employees). But if your production data is already some-place else, perhaps within a cloud of its own, then your backup model radically changes or perhaps even disappears.

• If you’re using online file sharing (OLFS) where your primary data copy is already cloud based, your data likely already re-sides in multiple data centers hosted on whatever cloud you’re using. you’re protected from component-level failures and if the service provider offers the ability to recover previous versions, you may not need any additional backup for that data. it’s in-evitable olFS and BaaS will overlap; for example, mozy recently announced olFS for its BaaS subscribers.

• If your data truly coexists in two locations, such as the iScSi-extending technology offered by riverbed with its granite prod-uct, you already have data at both a branch and a data center using storage that enables point-in-time recoveries.

• If your data is based in the cloud but lives locally, such as with gateway appliances like those from nasuni, StorSimple and other vendors, where local site filers are synchronized using

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Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or other cloud storage ser-vices, each site has native resiliency with disaster recovery as easy as spinning up a clean virtual machine and remounting the cloud-based lun. you could also use an on-premises backup solution of your on-premises filer for additional copies.

however you decide to leverage cloud backup services, the goal is still the same: get that data out of the building. n

JasonBuffingtonisasenioranalystfordataprotectionatMilford,Mass.-basedEnterpriseStrategyGroup(ESG).Hehasmorethan20yearsofexperienceintheITindustry.

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the reCent shortaGe of hard disk drives (hDDs) due to the floods in thailand has many information technology (it) people and ven-dors worried: Should they just pay the higher prices to get the drives they need, or turn to alternatives such as solid-state drives (SSDs)? necessity being the mother of invention, i believe this is a great opportunity for it to step back, take a holistic look and per-haps solve several problems at once. of course, some needs can’t wait, so paying heavy premiums may be your only recourse.

But if your needs aren’t that urgent, consider the following:

optimize and archive. Are you currently using primary stor-age capacity optimization tools that help you move data from primary storage to an archive platform such as tape or secondary disk? effective archiving can ease the burden on your primary disk and help defer new hDD purchases. As an added bonus, applica-tions will likely run faster because of lower capacity, and backups will be faster with less data to back up. And you won’t continue to back up the same unused data over and over, saving space on whatever backup media you use.

time to dedupe. on the backup side, if you haven’t started us-ing disk-based data deduplication, it may be time to start. Dedupe

read/write | arun taneja

Turn the hDD shortage into a strategic opportunity

With hard disk drive prices rising and some models tough to find, there are steps to take

to reduce your dependence on hard drives while gaining other benefits along the way.

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products can reduce disk requirements by a factor of 20 or more. if you only back up to tape right now, dedupe may help shorten backup windows, improve backup reliability and provide faster, more reliable recoveries, but this may mean buying additional disk. if you’re already backing up to disk, deduplication is a must. if you’re currently using deduplication, make sure it’s used with all backup sets.

primary data reduction. primary storage data reduction us-ing tools such as compression and deduplication can reduce disk capacities by a ratio in the range of 3-to-1 to 5-to-1, depending on data types. however, i’m reluctant to overemphasize data reduc-tion, as the products are still new in the marketplace (except for iBm’s real-time compression [rtc] and Dell’s ocarina-based prod-ucts) and some may impact performance. you should either apply them post process, as in the case of netApp’s built-in data reduc-tion, or do them inline as with iBm rtc. you don’t want to trade application performance for capacity savings. Smart archiving should be a higher priority.

think thin provisioning. if you haven’t taken advantage of thin provisioning in your storage arrays, this is a good time to turn it on. most popular arrays offer this functionality and many offer a way to convert thick logical unit numbers (luns) to thin luns on-line and totally nondisruptively. this same technology also applies to clones. See if your current array supports this functionality and thin those luns out.

trim snapshots. it’s also a good idea to do a check on how many snapshots you keep. you might find that paring them down has no effect on the level of protection an app needs and you can regain some disk space. of course, you should make sure the snapshot technology you use generates space-efficient snapshots.

use the cloud. if you’ve been thinking about moving some data to the cloud, this may be a good time to do so. look at backup,

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archiving and disaster recovery-type applications for the initial move of data to the cloud. But you should consider primary stor-age, too. there are vendors like StorSimple who offer excellent tier 2 primary storage, with cloud as the back end. in effect, they make cloud storage look and behave like primary storage, using caching, SSDs, deduplication, wide-area network (wAn) optimiza-tion and other technologies. with these cloud-integrated storage solutions, you effectively shift the hDD shortage problem to the cloud provider.

solid-state options. this is a great time to figure out what your SSD strategy should be. with SSDs, you can reduce hDD pur-chases while accelerating applications that are starved for i/o. But you need to develop an SSD strategy rather than just look at it as a hard disk drive alternative. not all applications need SSDs, and not all SSDs are alike, so some research is required to under-stand which applications would benefit and what type of flash product would be appropriate. A server-based pci express (pcie) card can provide storage and pump up the performance of a sin-gle physical server. SSDs can be placed in the hDD slots in servers or arrays, and intelligent software can automatically move data from flash to the hard disk drive and back, depending on its “heat factor.” there are many solid-state drive options and while they may be good replacements for hard disks, some planning and a strategy are required.

if you look around your shop, i’m sure you can come up with other best practices that may help reduce your company’s hard disk requirements. with the storage industry in a jam relative to hDDs, it could be a great time to rise above the panic and take steps that are strategic and consistent with good storage management. n

arun Taneja is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.

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Coping with

big data




Companies still rely on good ol’ nAswith all the talk about growing file capacity and new technologies that are sup-posed to handle all that data more elegantly, 81% of the companies in our recent survey say they’re using traditional network-attached storage (nAS). And we’re not talking just a nAS here or there: on average, those companies have 13 separate nAS systems installed, hosting an average total capacity of 258 tB. thirty-eight percent of respondents say their nAS is bundled into multiprotocol systems that combine a storage-area network (SAn) and nAS, a choice that’s growing in popularity. however it’s packaged, our nAS users want even more, with 51% saying they’ll add an average of 10 new nAS boxes in 2012. putting user shares on nAS is the most widely used application (86%), but they’re also used for non-critical apps (53%), hosting virtual servers (47%) and even mission-critical applications (43%). Among the non-nASers, 43% don’t see a need for shared networked storage, 30% are looking to deploy nAS this year and 17% are sticking with SAn. —Rich Castagna

“ We are a small shop and use a low-cost virtual san . . . not high performance, but cheap, reliable and fast enough.” —Survey respondent

snapshot

46

on average, what is the rate of utilization (based on capacity) of your company’s nAs systems?

What applications does your company run on its nAs devices?*

What’s the main reason why your company hasn’t deployed any network-attached storage (nAs) systems yet?

23% Standalone file servers sufficient20% Don’t need networked storage17% will install this year17% we have a SAn13% will install multiprotocol this year10% evaluating

More than 75%

51% to 75%

26% to 50%

Less than 25%

10%

12%16%

36%36%

User sharesNon-mission critical apps

Hosting virtual serversMission-critical apps

BackupOther

0% 20 40 60 80 100

86%53%

47%43%

7%5%

More than 75%

51% to 75%

26% to 50%

Less than 25%

10%

12%16%

36%36%

User sharesNon-mission critical apps

Hosting virtual serversMission-critical apps

BackupOther

0% 20 40 60 80 100

86%53%

47%43%

7%5%

32%Companies running their nAs systems on 10 Gbps ethernet networks

*Multiple selections permitted

Storage April 2012

A decade of storage

Disk drive


Integrating

cloud backup

Storage for

virtual servers

Coping with

big data




4747

storage magazine

vice President of editorialMark Schlack

editorial DirectorRich Castagna

senior Managing editorKim Hefner

executive editor Ellen O’Brien

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senior Managing editor Kim Hefner

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senior site editorAndrew Burton

Managing editorEd Hannan

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senior site editorSue Troy

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Assistant site editorFrancesca Sales

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