Storage Market update

Turbulent Times

When looking at how the storage vendor market has changed in the past year, it is also important to understand how customer attitudes have changed towards storage. Whilst it appears that the perception of storage as a consumable to be replenished without thought has faded, many organisations still have a disconnect between the business units creating the information, and the IT departments that are fighting to provide capacity where required given limited budgets and resources. In the relatively few organisations that have bridged that gap, initiatives are underway to manage capacity from a business perspective rather than simply an IT one. For the majority of businesses that remain, the challenge is how to cope with the following choice; either prop-up existing hardware with low cost hardware capacity but with high management overheads, or find additional funding to procure more flexible and easier to maintain storage and infrastructure. Cloud storage is emerging as a third option for some people; however critical mass has not yet been reached within the market. There still remains some concern on whether the value of “Storage as a Service” matches up to the wider value presented with cloud-based software offerings, which also removes a lot of the issues around storage management.

Dominating the storage headlines are the vendors fighting for ever more scarce customer funds, polarising the marketplace. Some vendors promote that they provide cheap capacity, focused on capacity versus costs, while others focus more on simplicity of management and reduced cost of ownership. Few mention performance or reliability as a primary focus for their products at the moment, instead preferring the sell storage using apocalyptic terms to instil fear into people of ever running out of disk space.

Recent IBM Offerings

Looking in more depth at specific vendor offerings, IBM is probably alone in the depth of owning its own technology through either design or via acquisition and reseller agreements with the likes of LSI and NetApp. The entire range of client needs can be met with the IBM portfolio, tape archive, de-duplication, NAS, SAN, virtualisation, compliant retention, and massive scalability. This means that for any given need there is an IBM product or products to fit the bill, under one purchase and one support contract. Most notable of IBM’s storage announcements of late is the IBM Storwize V7000. This product brings a powerful set of useful features from IBM’s SVC virtualisation product to mid-range storage, and is designed to keep capacity costs down whilst not increasing the storage administrator burden or impacting performance. It provides features such as thin provisioning to keep capacity needs down whilst reducing application management burdens. This allows future capacity to be defined without allocating or ring fencing disk that is likely to remain dormant for a significant period of time. Functionality is not just limited to the V7000; additional external storage can also be virtualised underneath the V7000, allowing data to be migrated between storage layers and devices without disruption, matching performance and capacity needs to the business needs. Taking this one step further the introduction of “Easy Tier”, an automated migration of data in and out of the optional Solid State Drives allows performance to be optimised without excessive spend on these most expensive units. Also included is the wide range of high availability and replication options seen throughout the IBM portfolio. This makes for a very capable, very flexible storage environment.

Recent HP Offerings

HP however isn’t too far behind; through the acquisition of Compaq, LeftHand and 3PAR they have in-house technology that is extremely strong and established in the midrange storage space. Examples of this are the EVA range and its own “X” range of NAS servers. HP is weaker at the Enterprise level, but they bolster this with reseller agreements with Hitachi to complete the picture. Tape wise both companies offer similar LTO based solutions, however IBM have the slight edge in terms of additional tape options and archive solutions.

HP has made a number of recent announcements in the storage arena. It is still providing enhancements to the existing range, such as the wider inclusion of SSD drives as well as announcing new software to improve functionality to multiple Virtual servers (VM or Hyper-V), to group capacity and create a virtual SAN without the expense and complexity of external shared storage devices. HP is also looking to address the far wider information management issues with a strategy direction called StoreOnce. With strong executive sponsorship this initiative aims to address data duplication across the entire enterprise from remote office locations to central data centres without the need for point solutions on each storage array and without compromising user access and response times.

General Market Trends

Looking round the rest of the industry as a whole it’s clear that Solid State Disk (SSD) is starting to take off in a big way, despite the high purchase costs. The reason for this is simply down to the significant jump in performance over tradition disk and the ease with which it can be implemented. Many organisations are at the stage where seek and retrieve times to highly utilised arrays are inadequate to meet business requirements. SSD removes much of the overhead of data retrieval. I/O rates for SSD are between 15 and 70 times faster than for standard spinning HDDs and use significantly less space and power. This means that despite the increased cost for SSD units (at about 10 times the price of traditional HDD), on a per I/O basis SSDs are typically 1/20th of the cost than standard drives. This price advantage only works however when the data on the SSD is current and used. Keeping data on SSD that is idle or dormant quickly ruins any advantage gained, if the data is dormant then it is better off on tape or slow HDDs. Therefore before implementing or sizing for SSD within your environment, ensure that the planned data is current (i.e. not historical). If this is not possible then look at the automated tiering products such as “Easy Tier” on the SVC and V7000 to automatically migrate data to and from SSDs transparently, rather than spend budget on surplus SSDs.

Coming to a Conclusion

Unfortunately it is features like these that provide one of the major challenges in procuring storage, the ability to differentiate the various features of a product against the need of the business. Many features described as “must haves” fail to live up to expectations, used to hide deficiencies within other areas, or poorly executed when applied to the rest of the environment. It is also common for clients to be risk averse; either gravitating towards technology they are already familiar with, regardless of suitability, or away if they’ve had a bad experience. Some are swayed by low upfront costs or even get bamboozled into wanting a feature that has no business value to the overall requirement. As a result “Decision Matrices” are common in procurement meetings to help combat this; however we regularly find the questions asked are focused on features rather than the business need itself. The best selection method we’ve found is a decision matrix where the end results rather than feature names are scored. Taken from our consulting toolkit, the following describes how to set up a decision matrix to get vendor agnostic results.

To conduct a Decision Matrix Analysis:

• Identify the evaluation criteria (Brainstorm) against general subject matter
• Describe the customer specific situation and the desired outcome
• Refine evaluation criteria against stakeholder specific requirement
• Allocate weight to each criterion with the customer. Weighting examples:
  • Allocate a total of 10 points across all criteria (where only a small number exist)
  • Assign a relative weighting to each criteria in turn e.g. 1 – 5, where 1 is not important and 5 is critical.
• Draw an “L” matrix with criteria/weights on first axis and concept options/ratings on second.
• Rate the options on ability against criteria. Rating examples
  • Establish a rating scale. 0 – 3. 0 no capability, 1 some, 2 most, 3 full
  • Pugh matrix. Where baseline option = 0 and alternative options are rated -1/+1 (or finer) against this.
• Multiply the ability rating against the criteria weighting, add all together to get overall concept score.
• The option with the highest score will not necessarily be the one to choose, but the relative scores can generate meaningful discussion and lead the team toward consensus

The main benefits are:

• Removes emotion from recommendation (although emotional factors can be decision criteria)
• Focus and structure thinking
• Mechanism for viewing multiple options
• Improves communication and decision making
• Increases efficiency by eliminating deep analysis/evaluation of inappropriate options.

At Centiq we have a long pedigree of assisting our clients make the right storage decision and we are happy to discuss your needs in more depth.