STORAGE - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/.../StoragemagOnlineDEC2014.pdfSTORAGE • DECEMBER 2014 3...

Home

Castagna: Software-defined storage relies on smart hardware

Toigo: Hypervisor SANs: More hype than SAN?

6 hot storage techs for 2015

Flash storage used for a wide variety of apps

Storage built with virtual servers in mind

Solid-state buyers seek speed, favor hybrid arrays

IBM and Dell are users’ choices as top tape libraries

Buffington: Cloud gateways make cloud backup easy

Taneja: Reference architectures are more than just marketing tools

About us

SNAPSHOT 1

Flash storage widely used for a variety of apps

EDITOR’S NOTE / CASTAGNA

Software-defined storage relies on smart hardware

VM STORAGE


STORAGE REVOLUTION / TOIGO

Hypervisor SANs: More hype than SAN?

STORAGE

DECEMBER 2014, VOL. 13, NO. 10

SNAPSHOT 2

Solid-state buyers favor hybrids that mix flash and disks

HOT SPOTS / BUFFINGTON

Cloud gateways make cloud backup easy

QUALITY AWARDS


READ-WRITE / TANEJA

Reference architec-tures are more than just marketing tools

MANAGING THE INFORMATION THAT DRIVES THE ENTERPRISE

6 hot storage techs for 2015Ready for prime time and prepared

to accelerate your data center

www.storagedecisions.com

STORAGE • DECEMBER 2014 3

HERE’S A SHORT quiz:

In a virtualized data center:A. Storage is the problemB. Storage is the solutionC. Storage is both the solution and the problemD. None of the above

It’s a trick question—all of the answers are correct. That’s because in most data centers the bottleneck that might be choking performance could be a moving target, given all the variables involved. Storage vendors are apt to suggest the network is the weak link, while the net-work crowd is quick to say storage is the sluggard. And both are likely to accuse servers of being the choke points

with all those virtual machines (VMs) keeping the CPU pinned near 100% while draining every last bit and byte of memory.

So, it’s kind of an “all of the above” situation, depend-ing on your particular infrastructure, the applications you’re running and your performance expectations. Any slightly past-its-prime storage array/application server/network switch could be the culprit, which makes it easy to pin the blame on hardware. If performance is lousy, there must be a clunky bit of hardware behind the slowdown, right?

Well, right or wrong, that’s the idea vendors of all stripes are apparently having a lot of success convincing many of us of. If there’s a problem, hardware is the nemesis: Hard-ware bad. Software good.

The whole software-defined technology movement is based on that kind of thinking. Put a layer between users, their apps and the hardware, and the problem is solved. Hardware becomes less important—less of an issue—and we gain all kinds of flexibility and agility because the software doesn’t care about all that hardware toiling away underneath.

I can see how people would want to believe that. Odds are your days are filled with battling both hardware and software. So if you could eliminate one of them—well, sort of eliminate—wouldn’t life be easier?

Software-defined advocates are likely to argue that

EDITOR’S LETTER RICH CASTAGNA

Smarter hardware is the key to making SDS workSoftware-defined storage (SDS) depends on hardware innovation.

Home










About us

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Eliminate-I-O-bottlenecks-improve-VM-performance

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Eliminate-I-O-bottlenecks-improve-VM-performance

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Planning-and-management-for-a-software-defined-storage-architecture


adding a new layer of software that puts some distance between you and the hardware simplifies operations, saves money and reduces the reliance on hardware products. To that I say: Maybe, maybe and maybe.

For me, the least-convincing argument for software-de-fined whatever is the one that seems to be mentioned most often by vendors: “It’s the same type of technology Google and Facebook use.” Now isn’t that convincing? I’m sure your company has about a billion servers like Google and Facebook, a few billion square feet of data center to house them, and a million or so engineers on hand to assemble all the required parts. How many companies even come close to “Web-scale” as the marketers like to say?

The other dent in the software-defined litany is the idea that adding a layer that wasn’t there before will solve everything. Sure, it can provide an easier user interface, and maybe eliminate some of the clumsier configuration gymnastics that tend to contort even veteran storage jockeys. But even with a slick top layer added, you’ll still have to get under the hood from time to time, so maybe you won’t be all that removed from the hardware after all.

But I think the strongest evidence that storage and other hardware isn’t about to disappear or become less important is that the whole software-defined thesis—whether it’s storage or networks or servers—relies on one key condition: that hardware continues to develop and get faster, bigger and better.

We wouldn’t be talking about virtualized servers if Intel hadn’t cooked up multi-core CPUs at a hyper-Moore’s Law pace. Or if networks didn’t skip along from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to 25 Gbps and 40 Gbps. And it’s hard to imagine anything

remotely approaching software-defined storage if flash hadn’t burst upon the scene a few years ago and then developed into more form factors than we had ever seen before.

Wonder why VMware requires flash in the servers it endeavors to turn into storage arrays with its Virtual SAN product? Maybe it’s because without that advanced stor-age hardware the software-defined storage array might not deliver sufficient performance. And now VMware is trying to bring its software-defined storage to a wider market under the EVO:RAIL moniker by partnering with hardware vendors.

Still, most software-defined storage products are still quite limited in the number of nodes and capacity they can provide, and also limited in delivering performance. But that will change, because storage hardware is getting better.

And it’s not just a matter of the hardware getter faster; it’s also getting smarter. Intel is churning out chips tweaked and tuned for specific environments and use cases. Storage, too, is getting smarter. One of the reasons software-defined storage can forsake hardware controllers for software versions is that a lot of that intelligence is now baked into the media, especially solid-state devices.

So it doesn’t matter if you think storage is the problem or the solution. Let’s just hope storage vendors continue on their development paths and keep making storage devices that get smarter and smarter, because the future of software-defined data centers will rely on intelligent hardware. nRICH CASTAGNA is TechTarget’s VP of Editorial/Storage Media Group.

Home










About us

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Software-defined-to-define-data-center-of-the-future

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Big-data-projects-require-big-changes-in-hardware-and-software

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240227440/With-EVO-RAIL-VMware-turns-VSAN-into-a-franchise

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/answer/What-is-software-defined-storage-and-what-can-I-do-with-it

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/answer/What-is-software-defined-storage-and-what-can-I-do-with-it

mailto:[email protected]


I HAVE BEEN testing some product alternatives in the serv-er-side or software-defined storage space, comparing them to solutions promoted by leading hypervisor vendors, including VMware and Microsoft. On this journey, I recently met up with StarWind Software, an outfit based in the Boston area, with development in Kiev, Ukraine. They’re also the company that arguably invented virtual SAN technology (though they failed to trademark the term), so they deserve some serious consideration.

HYPERVISORS HYPE THEIR SAN APPS

The first question that needs to be addressed is why a virtualization administrator would prefer to move outside

the comfort zone of a “one throat to choke” relationship with his/her preferred hypervisor vendor to consider a virtual SAN product from a third party. The thought of buying a “pre-integrated” hardware/software stack from a single source has enormous appeal—at least to anyone too young to remember life in an IBM data center circa 1980.

I am that old, however. In my first data center job, the entire IT hardware/software stack was dominated by Big Blue and you deviated from its prescribed architecture at your own risk. IBM had become a de facto standard and everyone had to comply with its rules for plugging and playing with the IBM stack if they wanted any purchase whatsoever in an IBM-dominated world.

That lock-in contributed a lot of great technology, but it also helped to make IT an extremely expensive compo-nent of the business. Over time, those costs set the stage first for a flirtation with IT outsourcing (service bureau computing) during the Reagan recession, and ultimately for the distributed computing “revolution” of the 1990s.

Today, hypervisor vendors seem to be taking a page from the old “one vendor is best” playbook to make the case for a new single-vendor model for the data center: hypervisor-controlled computing. In the worst-case sce-nario, we run the risk of locking ourselves into another master/slave relationship where we’re the ones chained to the oars. At best, we just make the operational side of our data center worse than it already is.

STORAGE REVOLUTION JON TOIGO

Software-defined storage that makes senseA hypervisor-based virtual SAN might seem convenient—until you run up against its limitations.

Home










About us

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Hypervisor-comparison-VMware-vs-Microsoft-vs-Red-Hat

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/information-technology/new-starwind-high-availability-iscsi-san-software-free-for-any-vmware-vexpert-vcp-or-vci/

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/information-technology/new-starwind-high-availability-iscsi-san-software-free-for-any-vmware-vexpert-vcp-or-vci/

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/answer/How-do-virtual-SANs-leverage-cache-resources


If, and this is quite likely, we end up using multiple hy-pervisors in our data center (in addition to having some critical apps that aren’t virtualized at all), we’re going to end up with multiple silos of data behind different hypervisor software-defined storage (SDS) strategies along with some “legacy storage.” VMware pretty much locks up access to its storage with its Virtual SAN, exclud-ing all non-VMware servers. Microsoft at least enables SMB access to the storage it controls provided it’s config-ured as a scale-out file server.

HYPERVISOR SAN GOTCHAS

What if you could simply deploy a third-party SDS that supported all applications, virtualized or not, with their data? That’s what a few companies, including StarWind Software, claim they can do. They provide block and file access to their virtual SAN storage to all comers. Sounds pretty good.

Moreover, when you dig down into VMware, you quickly learn that its SDS freezes out a lot of smaller firms and even some large ones. For the big guys, VMware offers no path to an all-silicon data center. You scale by adding disk to nodes and nodes to clusters. Flash can be used in the mix, but it isn’t included in scale-out capacity. That will irritate some large IT shops that see an all-silicon future.

Meanwhile, smaller firms are likely to be put off by VMware’s storage node requirements. First, you need a minimum of three nodes with all their storage maintained in an identical configuration, even as things scale. To

start, you’re looking at a combined hardware and software licensing cost of between $30K and $40K per node. That’s quite a bite out of a small shop’s IT budget. It might even be the entire budget for some modest environments.

So, for small and large firms, the VMware one-stop shop may already seem too expensive or limited. And

from a technical perspective, many architects are put off by the lousy way VMware SDS uses flash from a write perspective.

Depending on your virtual machine stack, you’ll be hammering your flash memory cache with small writes, which is to say you may burn out expensive flash devices more quickly than you thought. An alternative is to co-alesce your writes, and stack them up in DRAM until you can write them efficiently to flash in fewer but longer con-tent write operations. This functionality already exists in StarWind Software’s product. VMware advises us to wait another year or so.

Microsoft, by the way, has some limitations that may be off-putting to architects with a strategic view. Like VM-ware, Microsoft’s SDS approach, called Clustered Storage Spaces, isn’t terribly friendly to flash when used as a write

Home










About us

DEPENDING ON YOUR VIRTUAL MACHINE STACK, YOU’LL BE HAMMERING YOUR FLASH MEMORY CACHE WITH SMALL WRITES.

http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/tip/The-storage-hypervisor-Virtualization-is-about-more-than-the-server

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san/

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Extensive-VSAN-requirements-may-turn-shops-off

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Comparing-VMware-Virtual-SAN-with-Microsoft-Clustered-Storage-Spaces


cache. In fact, the vendor’s deduplication increases the number of writes since data is first written as is and then subsequently reduced by the dedupe algorithm. For those who want dedupe technology, the inline capability in the StarWind product is arguably more robust.

Another thing Microsoft shares with VMware is its penchant for nodal equipment definitions that might make the infrastructure too pricey for a smaller firm. This starts with the requirement that each node have external SAS JBODs (Microsoft uses some of the SAS technology to lock files and volumes, which is one of the points VMware uses to argue why it is not truly software-defined), which

are quite a bit pricier than their SATA cousins. StarWind supports both, plus PCI Express flash devices.

As you can see, hypervisor vendors are building out their SDS solutions in a manner that both addresses the architectural requirements of some of their customers—perhaps the majority—and favors the vendor’s concept of how SDS should work. An SDS-only vendor is in a better position to provide complementary support for hypervisor operations while helping users to (1) avoid getting locked into a particular vendor’s concept and architecture, and (2) realize an integrated storage environment that will support a number of workload types and their storage requirements.

StarWind Software, by the way, is only one potential solution to the issues raised above, but it has earned brag-ging rights for being the first provider of virtual SANs long before VMware or Microsoft seized on the idea. 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.

Home










About us

MICROSOFT REQUIRES EACH NODE TO HAVE EXTERNAL SAS JBODs BECAUSE IT USES SOME OF THE SAS TECHNOLOGY TO LOCK FILES AND VOLUMES.

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Defining-the-storage-hypervisor-Vendors-use-different-methods

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Defining-the-storage-hypervisor-Vendors-use-different-methods



IF YOU’VE BEEN wondering what newfangled technology will show up in your data center in 2015, read on. For 12 years, Storage magazine has celebrated the rite of passage into a new year by highlighting the half-dozen or so hot storage technologies we think will have a real impact on data center operations in the coming year.

As in years past, our list veers sharply in the direction of practicality—most of our hot techs are “newish” rather than brand-spanking new because we want to focus on those technologies that have attained a level of maturity that shows us they’re proven and generally available.

This year’s list reflects the profound impact solid-state has had on storage systems with enterprise-class all-flash arrays, flash caching and hybrid storage arrays all among 2015’s hot technologies.

Rounding out our bevy of noteworthy technologies are VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), which may revolu-tionize storage provisioning and configuration; affordable and speedy cloud-based disaster recovery (DR); and server SANs that transform servers into arrays.

VMWARE VIRTUAL VOLUMES

Virtual Volumes is a natural fit as a hot data storage technology for 2015, and could probably qualify for a few other lists, such as most eagerly anticipated and most

HOT TECHS FOR 2015

Hot storage techs for 2015These half-dozen techs are leading edge

and poised to help transform your data center. BY THE STORAGE MEDIA GROUP STAFF

ZOZULINSKYI /FOTOLIA

HOME


Home










About us

long-awaited storage technologies. Who wouldn’t want something that eliminates the need to use LUNs and NAS mount points to provision storage? That’s what VMware and storage array vendors promise VVOLs will do, and they say VVOLs are due any day now. They were part of the VMware vSphere 6 beta, which is expected to become generally available in the first quarter of 2015.

VVOLs give each virtual machine (VM) its own volume on the storage array to store services such as snapshots, replication and thin provisioning. That allows a VM to have its own storage services and policies.

VVOLs build on VMware vStorage APIs for Array Inte-gration (VAAI) and vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) initiatives. VAAI allows hypervisors to offload functions to storage systems, while VASA provides visibil-ity between the hypervisor and the array. VVOLs talk to the storage system directly through VASA instead of using LUNs or NAS mount points, and work as storage contain-ers with a data store, storage services and metadata. The containers align with individual VMs, so VVOLs change the main unit of storage management from a LUN to a VM object.

NetApp (FAS), Hewlett-Packard (3PAR) and Dell (Equal- Logic) say they’ll have arrays with VVOLs enabled as soon as VMware makes the technology generally available. EMC, the majority owner of VMware, is sure to follow and plans to support VVOLs in its ViPR software-defined stor-age platform. Smaller vendors have also disclosed VVOLs strategies. For instance, all-flash array vendor SolidFire plans to enable its quality of service to guarantee storage performance to every VM through VVOLs.

“If you manage storage, VVOLs need to be in your con-versation,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisor at StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn. “You need to get up to speed on it. Every storage vendor better have a VVOLs story. Having VVOLs will be table stakes, just like having a LUN or a file share.”

Newer storage companies, such as VM-centric array vendor Tintri and hyper-converged vendors such as Nu-tanix and SimpliVity, architected their systems from the start to avoid using LUNs and mount points to provision storage. VMware’s Virtual SAN (vSAN) hyper-converged software will support VVOLs in its next version. But legacy storage systems need to rework their arrays to support VVOLs with services such as snapshots, replication and thin provisioning.

“VVOLs are an inevitable progression of per-VM storage capabilities proven out by Tintri, and now embraced by Virtual SAN and others,” said Mike Matchett, a senior an-alyst at Taneja Group in Hopkinton, Mass. “Unfortunately, layering or retrofitting VVOLs support onto traditional arrays has proven challenging in the details.”

ENTERPRISE-CLASS ALL-FLASH ARRAYS

Performance-boosting all-flash arrays (AFAs) are poised for greater adoption across a wider range of workloads now that most of the major vendors and startups have bolstered their products with additional capacity options and enterprise storage and data reduction features.

Capabilities such as snapshots, clones and replication (Continued on page 11)

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/answer/What-are-VMware-VVOLs-and-how-do-they-work

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-machine

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/VMwares-vStorage-APIs-for-Array-Integration-VAAI-How-they-work-and-which-arrays-support-them

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/vStorage-APIs-for-Storage-Awareness-improve-view-into-arrays-in-VMware-environments

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240101875/Tintri-upgrades-VM-storage-appliance-features

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240101875/Tintri-upgrades-VM-storage-appliance-features

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/How-will-VMware-VVOLs-affect-you

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/How-will-VMware-VVOLs-affect-you

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Flash-storage-Guide-to-enterprise-all-flash-storage-arrays


Home










About us

C+

Next-generation solid-state storage

We stitched together two new flash techs—3D NAND and non-volatile memory express (NVMe)—under one heading. While interest is high for both, neither took off as predicted in 2014.

B+

Primary storage data deduplication

It took a couple of engineering marvels—solid-state storage and brutally powerful CPUs from Intel—but we finally saw primary storage dedupe make a breakthrough in 2014.

A-

Hyper-converged storage

There still might be a bit more hype than reality in hyper-converged systems, but this category gained some traction with hardware, software and all conceivable combinations popping up.

B+

Backup appliances

Despite Symantec deep-sixing its Backup Exec appliance, these all-in-one backup machines are still going strong with new players like Dell, HP, Unitrends, StorServer, Barracuda and others joining the fray.

C+

OpenStack storage

Lots and lots of talk, and more and more traditional storage vendors are building in OpenStack APIs, but we’ve seen a lot more tire kicking than actual implementations.

B-

Cloud-integrated storage

Our vision of arrays transparently tiering into cloud services might have been premature, but with EMC scarfing up TwinStrata and Microsoft taking possession of StorSimple, those links are inevitable.

Report card: Grading last year’s predictionsAnyone can make predictions, but it takes a bunch of serious storage writers to look back and grade their previous prognostications. Here’s a report card on how we think we fared with last year’s hot storage technology predictions.


Home










About us

have become commonplace in AFAs. Plus, the combina-tion of inline compression and deduplication, and the declining cost of flash have lowered the price of AFAs to the point they may be considered for general-purpose workloads.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company supermarket chain—better known as A&P—made a long-term invest-ment in IBM’s FlashSystem V840 in mid-2014 to replace end-of-life disk arrays. A&P expects to run multiple data-bases for mission-critical applications on the V840 and see benefits in performance and a reduced data center foot-print, according to Richard Angelillo, the company’s vice president of information services. A&P licensed IBM’s optional inline compression to potentially increase the capacity from 40 TB usable to 200 TB effective.

“The value of AFAs relative to pure [hard disk drive] HDD boxes is much more evident—and you hit ROI faster—if you’re loading multiple applications onto the array as opposed to just buying it to speed up a single application,” wrote Eric Burgener, a research director in IDC’s storage practice, in an email. Framingham, Mass.-based IDC predicts all-flash arrays will ultimately replace traditional arrays with their HDDs, Burgener noted.

Tim Stammers, a senior analyst at New York-based 451 Research, said the AFA market will show a 42% compound annual growth rate through 2018, when it reaches an estimated $3.4 billion. A 2013 survey of more than 200 enterprise storage professionals done by 451 Research’s InfoPro service showed just 8% had deployed or piloted all-flash arrays. This year, the percentage rose to 11%, and

another 19% said they expect to deploy AFAs within 18 months, Stammers said.

All-flash array vendors claim potential users need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) and price per IOPS rather than simply the price per gigabyte (GB). But Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Ore., said the usable price per GB will need to fall to the ballpark range of HDDs, especially in public per-ception—and not simply with the “hand-waving voodoo magic of dedupe and compression”—for AFAs to take off.

Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group, said the battleground for all-flash arrays and hybrid systems is the traditional array running 15,000 rpm HDDs. “Nobody should be buying HDD-only systems anymore. They’re all going to be hybrids or all-flash arrays,” he said.

CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY

Disaster recovery is one of the more costly and critical projects for IT, which makes the cloud a particularly attractive alternative to in-house deployments. As users have become more comfortable with cloud storage ser-vices such as backup, cloud-based DR offerings have pro-liferated for those who want to step up their use of cloud data protection services.

A cloud-based disaster recovery service requires rep-licating full data sets or entire VMs to the cloud. The services use server virtualization to access the storage in the cloud to effectively create a secondary data center. These offerings support server images and production data backup from a customer’s site to the provider’s cloud.

(Continued from page 9)

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/2240231607/AP-installs-IBM-FlashSystem-to-replace-aging-disk-arrays

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/2240231607/AP-installs-IBM-FlashSystem-to-replace-aging-disk-arrays

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240230398/All-flash-array-roundup-A-two-track-approach-from-big-storage

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/451-survey-finds-enterprise-flash-storage-adoption-real-and-growing

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/451-survey-finds-enterprise-flash-storage-adoption-real-and-growing

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/feature/Hybrid-storage-arrays-vs-all-flash-arrays-A-little-flash-or-a-lot

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/feature/Hybrid-storage-arrays-vs-all-flash-arrays-A-little-flash-or-a-lot

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Implementing-cloud-based-disaster-recovery-Six-key-steps


Home










About us

Prepackaged disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offer-ings make failing over to the cloud even easier and poten-tially less costly with pay-per-use pricing models.

“With disaster recovery, the TCO seems to hold steady in favor of using the cloud,” said Taneja Group’s Matchett. “Until you need it, the data is cold. One thing people are talking about is restoring in the cloud; if you have virtual-ization and backup virtual machines, then you can restore that VM in the cloud if the primary site is unavailable.”

Matchett said inroads have been made with tools that convert or migrate VMs to the cloud.

“There are tools that work at the level of the application blueprint where more complex application architectures can be spun up,” he said.

James Bagley, a senior analyst at Storage Strategies Now in Austin, Texas, said there’s been an increase in the past year in the number of DRaaS offerings, and they’re more upmarket with features such as automation, network rep-lication and the ability to transform hypervisors into the ones running in the cloud.

“There can be issues with taking an existing environ-ment and having it stand up in the cloud,” Bagley said. “Different hypervisors and network settings are usually the bugaboo there.”

Dragon Slayer Consulting’s Staimer said disaster recov-ery is more than just recovery of the data, meaning users need to broaden their evaluations of DRaaS offerings.

“It’s more than just mounting the data,” Staimer said. “How are you connecting to the user? Do they do network manipulation to allow access? Are they providing network recovery user access? What percentage of customers can

they take care of at one time and for how long? A lot of people who are getting into this don’t know what they’re getting into.”

Nonetheless, cloud-based DR can offer astounding recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives that are within the financial reach of even the smallest companies.

FLASH CACHING

Flash storage has the ability to reduce latency and boost IOPS, but solid-state hardware alone won’t necessarily do the trick. That’s where flash cache software comes in, providing intelligence and automated management that enables critical applications to be served from a higher performing tier of storage.

The emergence of flash cache as a hot technology par-allels the increased density of applications, particularly in data centers with large installations of transactional or analytic databases.

Flash caching vendors are winning converts by demon-strating that they can reduce the management burden while boosting overall system performance, said Jim Handy, a semiconductor analyst at research firm Objective Analysis in Los Gatos, Calif.

“Enterprises that have postponed adding flash to their systems are now becoming convinced that flash caching software can take away the last of the problems they wor-ried about,” Handy said.

Momentum in 2014 came from disruptive vendors like PernixData, which added the capability to pool server

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/Disaster-recovery-as-a-service-can-turn-DR-hope-into-a-plan

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/feature/DRaaS-means-disaster-recovery-doesnt-have-to-break-the-bank

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Primary-factors-for-migrating-VMs-to-the-cloud

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/feature/RTO-RPO-metrics-find-the-true-value-of-a-cloud-DR-strategy

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/feature/What-you-need-to-know-about-flash-caching

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240219531/PernixData-FVP-aims-to-cache-RAM-as-well-as-flash

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240219531/PernixData-FVP-aims-to-cache-RAM-as-well-as-flash


Home










About us

RAM for cache in virtualized environments, and from established hardware vendors like HGST, which unveiled its ServerCache software for Windows Server and Linux operating systems.

Flash cache can be deployed in tandem with HDDs in a single server, as a component within a shared stor-age array or aggregated in a virtual pool across multiple servers. The flash software uses algorithms that examine historical access patterns of applications and targets flash

at data blocks most in need of acceleration. The cache mechanism temporarily stores a copy of the hottest data on NAND memory chips, enabling files to be quickly retrieved while also freeing up production bandwidth.

Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm Gartner estimates the market for flash cache software could top $350 million by 2019, with a compound annual growth rate in the teens. The high cost of dedicated storage provided the impetus that gave rise to software-based flash cache, said David

Very, very warm … but not quite hot yet

TECHNOLOGY TEMPERATURE READING

Triple-level cell (TLC), 3D and memory channel flash

These three techs are the best bets to squeeze even more life out of NAND flash, but it’ll take time for fabs, vendors and users to catch up.

On-premises file sync and share

It makes sense: Give mobile users a secure cloud to swap and sync files, but IT is reluctant to add yet another service.

40 Gbps Ethernet As Ethernet goes, so goes NAS, iSCSI, Hadoop, convergence and so on—but shifting gears to speedier networking takes time.

Cloud-to-cloud backup Last year we said cloud-to-cloud backup wasn’t quite hot yet … and it still isn’t. But with more services popping up in the cloud, backup concerns are growing.

Ultra-high capacity media With a 10 TB tape drive from IBM and an 8 TB hard disk from HGST, it seems the sky’s the limit for media capacities, and these high-capacity devices have specialized roles.

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/2240226274/Western-Digital-HGST-updates-FlashMax-PCIe-SSDs-cache-software

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/2240226274/Western-Digital-HGST-updates-FlashMax-PCIe-SSDs-cache-software

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-evaluate-and-deploy-flash-storage-technology


Home










About us

Russell, a Gartner vice president of storage technologies and strategies.

“People are tired of overprovisioning. They don’t want to buy more Fibre Channel disk just to be able to meet the IOPS,” Russell said. “We live in a scarcity world and more of the spotlight is on storage, especially the server vendors whose margins have been hit hard.”

As all-flash arrays struggle to gain broad traction, flash caching has emerged as an interim method for speeding up performance on specific application workloads.

“In most environments, only about 10% to 15% of data is active at any point in time,” said George Crump, presi-dent of IT analyst firm Storage Switzerland. “Buying 10% to 15% of your capacity in flash, and having it automati-cally move the write data to cache at the right time is a very economical way to deploy flash.”

NETWORKING SERVER-BASED STORAGE

Traditional shared storage poses a number of problems in today’s virtualized world. The management of disparate storage entities is cumbersome, buying hardware to ac-commodate growing data is maxing out IT budgets and VMs have to battle each other for adequate IOPS. Those are all difficulties networking server-based storage tech-nology can help ease, and a reason why more enterprises will be considering it in 2015.

Also referred to as server-attached storage or server SAN, this technology uses software to abstract the com-ponents of a traditional shared storage architecture away from the hardware. The storage is directly attached to the

host server, while the software runs as a virtual machine, pooling the physical capacity so that all VMs have access.

That means expensive hardware is no longer a neces-sity; commodity servers, storage and networking can be used while still attaining adequate performance and capacity, and scaling becomes much more cost effective.

But perhaps the biggest draw of server-based storage technologies is the management capability. In traditional SAN environments, management features are specific to arrays. Server SANs abstract those features, spreading them across the aggregated capacity.

“The basic trend comes down to simplicity,” said Stuart Miniman, principle research contributor at research firm Wikibon. “Having just one platform layer that handles the whole infrastructure without having to manage it is what’s attractive.”

In a 2013 report, Wikibon said the revenue from the en-terprise server SAN market in 2013 totaled $270 million, and predicted a rapid migration from traditional to server SAN environments to begin in 2018.

One thing that’s apparent today is that more vendors, both established and startups, are continuing to make networking server-based storage plays.

According to Miniman, much of that activity can be at-tributed to VMware hyper-converged products. “VMware has a pretty important place in the ecosystem, so when they say ‘Let’s get rid of the storage array and have this new way of simplifying IT,’ people start to notice,” he said.

VMware last year launched vSAN, highly anticipated hyper-converged software that pools physical capacity to store VMs.

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/definition/over-provisioning-SSD-overprovisioning

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Networking-server-based-storage

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Networking-server-based-storage

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Value-of-server-attached-storage-rests-on-cost-implementation

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Value-of-server-attached-storage-rests-on-cost-implementation

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Server-SAN-infrastructure-model-of-Google-Facebook-poised-to-spread

http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/The_Rise_of_Server_SAN

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/VMware-Virtual-SAN-shines-storage-spotlight-on-VMware-hyper-convergence


Home










About us

“There are a ton of startups in this space,” Miniman said. “There’s everything from the big players like [Hew-lett-Packard] HP and EMC, to Dell doing almost every single solution in the space through partnerships and OEMs, and then there’s Nutanix, Nexenta and Fusion-io.”

At VMworld this year, VMware expanded on its serv-er-based storage software platform in a way that allows hardware vendors to get on board with EVO:RAIL. The reference architecture provides a form factor for hardware partners to build on while using the vSAN architecture for management and provisioning.

HYBRID STORAGE ARRAYS

Hybrid flash arrays that mix HDDs and solid-state drives (SSDs) are the leading option for enterprise flash de-ployments today—still well ahead of all-flash arrays and server-side flash.

According to a recent IDC report, 51% of enterprises with at least 1,000 employees have already added flash to their storage environment. Of that group, 84% have deployed some kind of hybrid system. Sixty-six percent said they took a DIY approach by adding SSDs to existing arrays, while 18% opted for a new hybrid array.

Purpose-built hybrid flash array deployments will likely increase this year. Whether designed from the ground up or re-architected for flash, these arrays offer better per-formance and reliability than a DIY hybrid array because they’re designed to make the best use of flash rather than treating the drives as if they were traditional spinning

disks. Every major storage vendor offers hybrid flash ar-rays today, and most offer a variety of choices. EMC sells scalable hybrid VNX and VMAX systems in a variety of capacity and performance levels. The company also offers hybrid flash systems aimed at specific workloads such as the EMC Isilon Solutions for Hadoop Analytics and the EMC Isilon Video Surveillance Solution. And depending on the configuration, hybrid systems are less expensive than all-flash arrays.

Other than cost, the main limitation of all-flash arrays is capacity. Until recently, all-flash arrays offered enough capacity to handle certain application workloads but not enough to serve an entire enterprise. That’s changing, but it’s still far from the norm. Capacity is, of course, much less of an issue in hybrid systems running high-performance flash alongside hard disk storage. NetApp’s FAS8080 EX scales to 5.76 PB of spinning disk and 36 TB of flash, for example.

Most organizations have one or two applications, such as virtual desktop infrastructure, which require very high performance, while the rest of their apps are perfectly happy accessing data on traditional disk drives. This makes hybrid arrays appealing to many organizations to-day. As the price of flash continues to decline and capacity grows, all-flash arrays may take the lead, but for now the hybrid array is king. n

ANDREW BURTON, RICH CASTAGNA, GARRY KRANZ, SONIA LELII, DAVE RAFFO, CAROL SLIWA and SARAH WILSON are the members of TechTarget’s Storage Media Group who contributed to this article.

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/How-will-EMC-Dell-position-EVO-RAIL-appliances

http://www.computerweekly.com/podcast/Hybrid-flash-array-What-it-is-and-how-to-use-it

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Big-storage-turns-the-tide-in-the-hybrid-flash-array-market

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240224132/EMC-upgrades-Isilon-NAS-for-file-storage-Hadoop-analytics

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/How-to-overcome-flash-based-storage-limitations-to-ensure-efficiency

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/video/Two-ways-hybrid-storage-arrays-maximize-the-potential-of-flash

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/video/Two-ways-hybrid-storage-arrays-maximize-the-potential-of-flash


D Which apps are flashy?

Snapshot 1More than half of companies already use flash for a variety of apps

Home










About us

D Does your company currently use solid-state storage?

* MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED

18+51+31+s31%

18%

51%

D How has solid-state storage been deployed in your company?*

Database applications

Virtualization

Online transaction processing

Virtual desktop infrastructure

Big data analytics

ERP

Web and application serving

Finance/ HR applications

CRM

Science/ Engineering apps

Messaging

Yes

No, but we’re

evaluating

No, and we have no

plans

48% 52%

35% 41%

26% 21%

21% 27%

19% 21%

14 14

14 18

14 13

11 11

8 10

7 9

n CURRENTLY USING FLASH

n PLAN TO USE FLASH

Hybrid HDD-flash array

In servers

All-flash arrays

Caching appliance

64%

40%30%

14%


WITH APOLOGIES TO John Lennon and his great song, Imag-ine, here’s a 21st century twist on the tune with more than a passing nod to storage:

Imagine no RAID groupsIt’s easy if you tryNo LUNs to mess withVolumes gone bye-byeImagine all the adminsSleeping well at night …

While not nearly as catchy as the original, it does make a point: Purpose-built virtual server storage has some significant differences from SAN and NAS. Rather than using the familiar constructs of RAID, LUNs and volumes on external shared storage arrays, virtual server storage is predominantly characterized by federated direct-attached storage (DAS) or purpose-built appliances. With most implementations, methods other than RAID are used to ensure data integrity and the storage software manages the relationship between the application server (a virtual machine) and the related data. This new architecture may actually improve data availability while simplifying

Purpose-built virtual server

storageVendors are offering storage systems specifically engineered for virtual servers with an approach that’s fundamentally different from SAN or NAS.

BY PHIL GOODWIN

VIRTUAL SERVER STORAGE

HOMEEMIELDELANGE/FOTOLIA

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/How-virtual-server-storage-trends-affect-management


the storage administrator’s life. At least, that’s what VM- specific storage is supposed to do.

Certainly, any modern-day storage can be configured to serve virtual machines. As a result, industry messaging can get a bit confusing. Terms like VM-ready and VM-aware have no industry standard definition, so vendors are free to use those phrases to mean whatever they want. Moreover, just because a system, such as software-defined storage (SDS), is built on top of a hypervisor doesn’t mean it’s uniquely suited to a virtual environment. To get past the label, IT managers need to look for products that cor-relate an application server (VM) directly with the related data, not a LUN or volume. If a product provisions LUNs and volumes in the traditional manner, it doesn’t strictly stand up as a VM purpose-built system as we’re using the term here. Given that the majority of IT organizations are more than 50% virtualized in their Windows/Linux en-vironments—with many approaching 90% virtualized—this is an emerging market that should attract more than passing interest from storage managers.

STORAGE THEN AND NOW

Some IT managers may question whether it makes sense to revisit the internal DAS architecture of yesteryear. SAN and NAS evolved from DAS architecture because manag-ing storage siloes attached to servers was so difficult and typically very costly. This was principally driven by the evolution from relatively few mainframe-centric servers to distributed computing with hundreds of servers. SAN and NAS provided a way to centrally manage storage,

improve utilization and enhance storage agility. Thus, SAN and NAS represented a significant revolution in storage management for distributed systems.

The server revolution to virtualized computing has had as much impact on storage as distributed systems had earlier. Virtual computing has evolved faster than storage

has been able to keep up. At first, accommodating VMs was no big deal. A LUN allocation was a LUN allocation, and the storage system didn’t care if it was physical or virtual. However, as VM migration evolved, the limits of SAN and NAS became apparent. While migrating the VM became trivial, having storage pinned to LUNs and volumes was a real anchor that dragged down the agility desired by organizations.

In addition, the ability to spin up VMs in a matter of minutes has contributed to significant performance defi-ciencies. Adding VMs on the fly to a volume can quickly oversubscribe the available aggregate IOPS. VMs can hog the performance of the disks, negatively impacting the other VMs assigned to the volume. This is called the “noisy neighbor” problem. Organizations typically respond by adding spindles, which are costly and may be poorly

Home










About us

MIGRATING VMs BECAME TRIVIAL, BUT STORAGE PINNED TO LUNs AND VOLUMES DRAGGED DOWN THE AGILITY DESIRED BY ORGANIZATIONS.

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/Storage-for-virtual-servers-getting-smarter

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/opinion/Storage-for-virtual-servers-getting-smarter

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/VM-aware-storage-provides-better-migration-performance-and-more

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/VM-aware-storage-provides-better-migration-performance-and-more

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/ehandbook/The-evolution-of-virtual-server-technology-Hypervisor-aware-storage

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/When-direct-attached-storage-makes-sense

http://searchsmbstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Data-storage-for-virtual-environments-Pros-and-cons-of-DAS-NAS-and-SAN

http://searchsmbstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Data-storage-for-virtual-environments-Pros-and-cons-of-DAS-NAS-and-SAN

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/video/Top-features-to-boost-VMware-storage-performance

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/video/Top-features-to-boost-VMware-storage-performance


utilized as a result. To truly realize the benefits of virtual computing, storage solutions need to evolve beyond just SAN and NAS.

VIRTUAL SERVER STORAGE ARCHITECTURES

The virtual server storage market is in its early stages and, as such, products are predominantly offered by emerging vendors, though established vendors are entering the mar-ket. To be truly successful, these products need to offer the best of both worlds: the direct relationship between the data and application server, like DAS combined with the convenience of centralized storage management, and the robust storage functionality found on SAN and NAS. These systems should also complement the agile nature of virtual computing without compromising performance or availability.

Given that this market segment is in its early evolution, it’s characterized by highly differentiated products and dueling technologies. All have their particular strengths and target audiences, and give IT managers a wide range of solutions to choose from. Labels such as converged, hyper-converged and other monikers are bandied about, but without standard definitions, labels alone won’t help IT managers to understand how products are positioned.

These products fall, more or less, into one of three groups:

n Software-onlyn Integrated appliancen Storage appliance

Tintri’s VMstore and Tegile Systems’ HA-series and T-series arrays are examples of storage appliances, but they should not be lumped in with more traditional SAN/NAS arrays. Both have purpose-built operating systems (OSes) optimized for use in a VM environment. Tintri’s OS allows all storage functions to be scheduled through the VM. Its internal file system treats each virtual machine as an individual entity and federates the storage into a single name space. Storage in VMstore is a combination of flash

and hard disk drives (HDDs), but Tintri guarantees that 99% of I/Os will be serviced by high-performance flash. Tegile offers a hybrid array as well as an all-flash array. Its IntelliFlash software optimizes the media and data movement within the device. OS storage provisioning and monitoring at the VM level to manage capacity and IOPS performance is done by virtual machine rather than by volume.

EMC’s ScaleIO and the Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP) are two software-only solutions in this market. ScaleIO is billed as “100% hardware agnostic.” It can run in a hyper-visor—including VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer or KVM—or on a bare-metal OS such as Linux. While it can use storage arrays, EMC suggests the lowest

Home










About us

TINTRI AND TEGILE BOTH HAVE PURPOSE-BUILT OPERATING SYSTEMS OPTIMIZED FOR USE IN A VM ENVIRONMENT.

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Top-virtual-data-storage-market-trends-in-2013

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/converged-infrastructure

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/podcast/Hyper-converged-infrastructure-starts-to-offer-greater-choice

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240220680/Tintri-VMstore-appliance-adds-Hyper-V-support

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240231191/Firm-shifts-to-Tegile-Systems-hybrid-array-for-VM-storage

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/news/2240221870/Tegile-Systems-adds-all-flash-to-its-hybrid-array-lineup


total cost of ownership is achieved using DAS.Although MxSP is a software product, Maxta provides

reference architectures of servers, storage and network equipment. Users aren’t limited to those configurations, but the reference architectures are pre-validated by the company. MxSP is designed for DAS, which can be a combination of solid-state drives (SSDs) and HDD. The Maxta Distributed File System, which provides a global namespace and supports VMDKs, is a log-based file system that supports block data movement across tiers.

EMC ScaleIO is a block-based, scale-out system that doesn’t use a file system. The product has two main com-ponents: a ScaleIO Data Client (SDC) and a ScaleIO Data

Server (SDS). Each one can be installed on any server, but the SDC kernel module must be installed on any node that requires data access. The SDS can be installed on nodes with DAS capacity. EMC touts having demoed up to 11 million IOPS with ScaleIO, while using just 20% CPU overhead.

Nutanix’s Virtual Computing Platform is an example of an integrated appliance that includes compute, storage and software in each node. The minimum configuration is three nodes to provide sufficient resilience across a pool of resources in a shared-nothing architecture. Nutanix offers its own appliance or pre-qualified configurations using Dell servers. The Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) aggregates all nodes. An SSD tier is required, where all data writes are logged. Every node has access to the metadata, which uses MapReduce to enhance reliabil-ity and recoverability. Like all of the other products in this category, storage is provisioned at the VM level and NDFS manages data locality relative to the VM for optimized performance. Best-practice guidelines recommend a 10 Gbps Ethernet network for connectively between nodes.

IMPLEMENTING VM-SPECIFIC STORAGE

Storage services such as deduplication, compression, thin provisioning and the like have become table stakes among storage products. It’s no different among purpose-built virtual server storage systems, where storage managers can expect these capabilities to be built in. One major area of difference is how data is protected. Since RAID is not a part of these architectures, different products use various

Home










About us

VM storage vs. traditional SAN/NAS: Five differencesn No more RAID, LUNs or volumes required

n Application servers are tied to associated

data, not volumes

n No “noisy neighbor” issues associated

with shared volumes

n Performance not tied to spindle count

n Data integrity and recovery generally

facilitated by a distributed data mechanism

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240208900/Maxta-comes-out-with-software-only-hyper-converged-storage

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240220143/EMC-explains-differences-between-ScaleIO-VSAN-and-ViPR-software

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240218899/Nutanix-completes-phase-two-of-dedupe-plan-for-hyper-converged-storage

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/MapReduce


Home










About us

means to ensure data integrity and recoverability.EMC ScaleIO, for example, uses a two-copy distributed

“mesh” mirroring methodology to ensure recoverability and eliminate single points of failure. Each node has an authoritative mapping of system components to facilitate recovery. This map requires just 4 MB of memory to hold the metadata of up to 10 PB of actual data. In addition, data is striped across all available nodes, which signifi-cantly reduces rebuild times and reduces the risk of a double device failure.

Maxta MxSP always replicates data synchronously across nodes, even geographically; asynchronous capabili-ties are also available. Although the data may be replicated across geographically dispersed locations, the purpose is not so much for disaster recovery (DR) as it is for high availability (HA) and application availability, not just data availability.

Nutanix recently announced its Metro Availability functionality across data centers. Systems within 400 km of each other can achieve a zero recovery point objective and near-zero recovery time objective with the feature. It is useful for maintenance operations, HA and DR.

In some respects, purpose-built virtual server storage systems embody a disruptive technology because they change some fundamental architectural precepts. As such, they will initially be siloes within the data center. But make no mistake; this is a key storage technology of the future. Traditional SAN and NAS will be predominant for some time, but an architecture that simplifies storage management and complements virtual computing is in-evitable. Storage managers will do themselves a favor by learning about virtual server storage systems now. n

PHIL GOODWIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/disk-striping

http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/tip/Data-replication-technologies-Asynchronous-vs-synchronous-replication

http://www.nutanix.com/blog/2014/10/09/announcing-nutanix-metro-availability/

Snapshot 2


Need for speed prompts flash purchases; hybrid arrays are first choice

Home










About us

D What factors are most important when evaluating solid-state

products?

D What need will you address with solid-state storage?*

51%

29%

25%

25%

24%

21%

13%

12%

1. Speed/Performance

2. Compatibility

3. Price

4. Read I/O capability

5. Write I/O capability

6. Features and functionality

Performance for existing app(s)

Performance of storage for virtual servers

New server virtualization project

New application deployment

Optimize/Consolidate storage

New VDI deployment

Performance of existing VDI

Other

* MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED* MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED

D How do you plan to implement your new solid-state storage?*

Hybrid HDD-flash array

In servers All-flash arrays

Caching appliance

61%

43%37%

31%Plan to

purchase 67 TB


IBM and Dell dominate tape

library user ratingsPerennially a strong competitor, IBM earns the top

spot among enterprise tape libraries for the second time, while Dell snares its first midrange win.

BY RICH CASTAGNA

OF ALL THE storage technologies one might find in a modern data center, tape probably gets the least respect. But the media is still appreciated by the hundreds of respondents to our annual Quality Awards for tape libraries who took time to provide feedback on the libraries they use.

The inevitable pronouncements of tape’s demise are un-erringly premature, as tape storage systems continue to be the most convenient and cost-effective way to get backup data off-site and tucked away securely. Although many backup mavens tout cloud storage as a tape replacement, tape is still likely to have a price advantage over cloud storage. While the price to store a gigabyte of data might be initially cheaper in the cloud than on tape, the charge for keeping that data in the cloud is recurring. Storing a tape in an abandoned salt mine is likely to cost far less on a monthly basis.

Tape technology also continues to march on, with ev-er-higher throughput and capacity with each new gener-ation. IBM’s TS1150 tape drives and media, for example, can store a whopping 10 TB of data, and the LTO roadmap was recently extended to include 25 TB (LTO-9) and 48 TB (LTO-10) media capacities.

This year, 321 users completed our survey, providing 473 product evaluations.

QUALITY AWARDS | TAPE LIBRARIES

HOME

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/magazineContent/Tape-makes-a-comeback-but-was-it-ever-gone

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/Will-tape-have-a-second-life-with-data-protection-in-the-cloud

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/news/2240230680/LTO-tape-vendors-announce-LTO-9-and-LTO-10

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/news/2240230680/LTO-tape-vendors-announce-LTO-9-and-LTO-10


Home










About us

Overall Rankings

Enterprise: Among the higher end tape libraries evaluated in the Quality Awards, IBM has been a strong contender, finishing among the top three for overall rankings in all nine Quality Awards surveys to date. This is the second time IBM has won it all. IBM’s overall 6.39 tally put it well ahead of the other finalists, with Quantum and Oracle placing second and third. Quantum’s margin over Oracle was the slimmest possible—just 0.01 point—effectively resulting in a dead heat. Both Quantum and Oracle have prevailed in this category in previous surveys.

IBM led for all five rating categories, with winning margins ranging from 0.05 to 0.55. But the result wasn’t particularly surprising considering IBM’s pedigree as a tape pioneer and a tape tech leader. Quantum and Oracle divvied up second-place category finishes, with Quantum netting two and Oracle three.

Midrange: With five finalists in the midrange tape library field, the finish was extremely close, with only 0.14 sepa-rating the top three vendors. But Dell (6.15) eked out a vic-tory over IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP)—6.10 and 6.01, respectively—for its first trip to the winner’s circle after coming close last year with a strong second-place finish.

This is the fourth time Dell has finished in the top three. Second-place IBM notched its ninth consecutive top-three finish. Last year’s winner, HP, rounded out this closely packed trio.

Dell scored highest in three of the rating categories, with IBM finishing first in the other two. In two of the categories in which Dell prevailed, IBM finished second. HP had a consistent showing that included second place in two categories and third place in three.

IBM

Quantum

Oracle

HP

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.39

5.97

5.96

5.67

Enterprise tape libraries: Overall rankings

6.00: To date, the second-lowest overall average score for enterprise tape libraries.

Dell

IBM

HP

Tandberg

Oracle

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.10

6.15

6.01

5.67

5.58

Midrange tape libraries: Overall rankings

5.90: The lowest overall average score since the first two surveys for tape libraries.


Sales-force Competence

Enterprise: Our enterprise tape library purveyors had a nip-and-tuck competition in the sales-force competence rating category. IBM’s 6.14 score was enough to top Ora-cle’s 6.09, which, in turn, just barely slipped by Quantum at 6.07. This was the most hotly contested rating category for the enterprise group of products. Of the six rating statements in the category, IBM led on three: 6.52 for hav-ing a knowledgeable sales support team, 6.27 for knowing about customers’ industries and 6.11 for keeping users’ interests foremost. Oracle was strong for all statements and earned the highest mark (6.31) for sales reps who un-derstand their customers’ businesses. Quantum’s 6.16 led the pack for the statement “My sales rep is flexible,” and its 5.87 was the highest score for sales reps who are easy to negotiate with. Midrange: Dell (6.17) overwhelmed the competition for

sales-force competence by notching the top scores on five of the category’s six rating statements. Dell’s best marks were for “The vendor’s sales support team is knowledge-able” (6.47) and “My sales rep understands my business” (6.30). Second-place IBM (5.89) had the best score (6.00) for “My sales rep keeps my interests foremost.” IBM also received a 6.22 for knowledgeable sales support teams.

HP was third, with a category score of 5.70 vs. Oracle’s 5.66. HP’s best rating was for the knowledgeable sales sup-port team statement (5.87); Oracle earned a 6.24 on that statement, its highest mark, and another 6.00-plus rating for reps who understand users’ businesses (6.05). All five finalists had their best marks for knowledgeable support teams, with Tandberg earning a 6.06 for that statement.

Home










About us

Dell

IBM

HP

Oracle

Tandberg

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

5.89

6.17

5.70

5.66

5.23

Midrange tape libraries: Sales-force competence

IBM

Oracle

Quantum

HP

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.14

6.09

6.07

5.39

Enterprise tape libraries: Sales-force competence

6.17: The best statement score for this group as a whole for “The vendor’s sales support team is knowledgeable.”

5.73: The average score for this category, which tied for the second-lowest score ever.


Home










About us

Initial Product Quality

Enterprise: IBM swept the initial product quality category rather handily by outscoring the competition on all six rating statements with consistently high marks ranging from 6.38 to 6.66. There was a substantial gap between IBM’s 6.52 category average and second-place finisher Quantum’s 6.01; HP tallied a 5.87 to wrest third place from Oracle (5.72). IBM netted its top score for one of the survey’s key rating statements: an impressive 6.66 for “This product delivers good value for the money.” IBM garnered similarly high results for ease of use (6.61) and user satisfaction with the level of professional ser-vices a product requires (5.58). Quantum cruised into second place powered by three 6.00-or-higher scores, highlighted by a 6.19 for ease of installation. HP had one statement rating over 6.00, a 6.12 for ease of use, and also scored well on the value statement (5.88).

Midrange: All the finalists in the midrange tape library group fared well for initial product quality with four of the five finalists notching scores exceeding 6.00 on all six statements. Dell was a category winner once again (6.45), flexing its muscles by beating the field on four of the statements, with third-place HP (6.28) and IBM taking one apiece. Tandberg (6.30) slid into second ahead of HP with a set of six very consistent scores, ranging from 6.10 to 6.38. Dell stood out for products that are easy to install (6.76), easy to configure (6.57) and that deliver good value for the money (6.44). Tandberg’s best rating also came for ease of installation (6.48). HP’s highest mark (6.30) was for the statement “I am satisfied with the level of profes-sional services this product requires.”

Dell

Tandberg

HP

IBM

Oracle

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.30

6.45

6.28

6.23

5.65

Midrange tape libraries: Initial product quality

IBM

Quantum

HP

Oracle

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.52

6.01

5.87

5.72

Enterprise tape libraries: Initial product quality

6.15: The best score earned by these finalists was for ease of use.

6.27: Best overall category showing, highlighted by this group average for easy installation.


Home










About us

Product Features

Enterprise: There may be uncertainty about tape’s role in storage environments, but there’s little doubt the technol-ogy continues to advance. Overall, the enterprise products in the survey put up their best numbers in the product features rating category, with a group average of 6.16. Category winner IBM demonstrated that strength with a 6.46 score built on taking top honors on seven of the eight category statements. IBM fashioned its victory with high ratings such as a 6.72 for product performance, a 6.67 earned for scalability and a 6.62 for the overarching state-ment “Overall, this product’s features meet my needs.”

Second-place Oracle picked up its best mark (6.44) on the features statement, and added a 6.38 for products that are well-designed. Quantum came in third with all 6.00-or-higher scores, including a group-leading 6.00 for use interface.

Midrange: Dell’s final category win was earned for its fea-ture set. Its 6.36 score led IBM (6.15) and HP (6.14), which finished in a virtual tie. Dell was just slightly less dominat-ing than IBM was in the enterprise group, winning six of the eight category statements, highlighted by a stunning 6.71 for “Overall, this product’s features meet my needs.” Dell also earned honors for management features (6.57), performance (6.46) and user interface (6.41).

IBM led the pack with a 6.26 score for having well- designed products, but its top score came on the general features statement (6.36). HP received a 6.45 rating on the same statement. HP’s other good ratings came for performance (6.22) and management features (6.20). Tandberg finished out of the top three, but had the best mark for loading/ejecting tape efficiently (6.19).

Dell

IBM

HP

Oracle

Tandberg

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.15

6.36

6.14

5.94

5.72

Midrange tape libraries: Product features

IBM

Oracle

Quantum

HP

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.46

6.19

6.13

5.87

Enterprise tape libraries: Product features

5.90: While enterprise users gave a thumbs up to tape library features, the user interface had the lowest overall average.

5.85: Scalability received the lowest overall statement score for the group.


Home










About us

Product Reliability

Enterprise: IBM enjoyed its widest margin of victory by outscoring the field on all seven rating statements in the product reliability category on the way to rolling up a tally of 6.39. IBM’s highlights include its highest mark (6.85) for products that require very few unplanned patches or updates, a 6.73 for meeting service-level requirements, 6.48 for rarely being the cause of backup failures and a sturdy 6.38 for having very few bugs. IBM has finished out of the top three in this category only once in nine years. Oracle notched its top score on the unplanned patches and updates statement (6.23) to go along with a 6.13 for service-level agreements. HP nosed out Quantum, 5.69 to 5.64, to place third with its highest grade—a 5.81—com-ing for the statement “Patches/updates can be applied non-disruptively.” All of the other products received their lowest scores on that statement.

Midrange: In a tightly contested product reliability race, IBM emerged as the midrange leader with a slim 6.03 to 5.98 victory over HP. At 5.92, Dell was a close third, as the top three were bunched up within 0.11 points of each other. Oddly, IBM had top ratings on only two of the seven category statements; second-place HP and third-place Dell each had two and tied on another.

IBM prevailed for non-disruptive patches/updates and for providing comprehensive upgrade guidance. But its best score was a 6.30 for meeting service-level require-ments. HP led for products that rarely cause backup failures (6.04), and for easy and intuitive error handling (5.76). Dell had the highest statement score (6.51) for service-level requirements and a 6.26 for very few unplanned patches/updates. HP and Dell tied for having very few bugs (6.11).

IBM

HP

Dell

Tandberg

Oracle

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

5.98

6.03

5.92

5.55

5.34

Midrange tape libraries: Product reliability

IBM

Oracle

HP

Quantum

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.39

5.84

5.69

5.64

Enterprise tape libraries: Product reliability

5.89: The lowest category average score posted for reliability.

5.43: The Achilles’ heel for midrange tape libraries seems to be error handling.


Technical Support

Enterprise: Over the years, IBM has fared very well for technical support on Quality Awards surveys, regardless of the product category. This time around is no different, with IBM putting up the best scores for all eight tech support statements. This win also means IBM has an un-broken string of top-three finishes in all nine tape library surveys. On its way to the winner’s circle, IBM posted a 6.86 for delivering technical support as contractually specified, backed by a pair of 6.62s for resolving problems in a timely manner and having knowledgeable support personnel, and a 6.51 for taking ownership of problems.

With a 6.01 category total, Quantum placed second, with its best rating coming for knowledgeable support per-sonnel (6.38). Oracle finished third, with some very solid scores, including a couple of 6.30s for the knowledgeable personnel and ownership statements.

Midrange: IBM duplicated its enterprise win with similar results in the midrange tape library technical support cat-egory (6.18). It garnered the top tallies on seven of eight statements. HP had the other statement high score on its way to another strong second-place finish (5.96), again nosing out Dell (5.87). As it did in the enterprise group, IBM posted its best result for delivering support as prom-ised (6.37), complemented by a 6.29 for issues that rarely require escalation and a 6.28 for having knowledgeable third-party partners.

HP’s 6.19 for taking ownership of problems led the pack, but its best score was a slightly higher 6.20 earned on the delivering support as promised statement. That was also Dell’s strongest statement (6.34), which topped 6.00 for “This product is easy to service” (6.10).

5.61: Enterprise tape vendors may need to spend time with customers based on this group score for providing adequate training.

Home










About us

IBM

HP

Dell

Tandberg

Oracle

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

5.96

6.18

5.87

5.55

5.32

Midrange tape libraries: Technical support

IBM

Quantum

Oracle

HP

0 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00

6.44

6.01

5.94

5.55

Enterprise tape libraries: Technical support

5.43: This average score suggests midrange tape vendors must do more to train users.


Home










About us

Would You Buy This Product Again?

AFTER ASKING FOR detailed service, functionality and reliability ratings, we ask our survey respondents a simple question: Given what you know now, would you buy this product again? Although the responses to this question may sometimes seem at odds with the rest of the survey, this time they’re essentially consistent. n

Enterprise: IBM garnered the highest score, with 93% of its users stating they would repeat their tape library purchase. Quantum and Oracle placed second and third, respectively, just as they did in the overall rankings.

Midrange: Dell and HP swapped their overall first- and third-place midrange tape library positions in this cate-gory, but the top three finishers were separated by a mere percentage point.

RICH CASTAGNA is TechTarget’s VP of Editorial/Storage Media Group.

HP

IBM

Dell

Tandberg

Oracle

89%

90%

89%

81%

79%

IBM

Quantum

Oracle

HP

0 20 40 60 80 100%

93%

82%

78%

77%

Enterprise tape libraries: Would you buy this product again?

0 20 40 60 80 100%

Midrange tape libraries: Would you buy this product again?

94%: The highest “buy again” mark was achieved by HP all the way back on the second Quality Awards for tape libraries.

90%-plus: HP’s midrange tape libraries have earned four 90% or better “buy again” scores over the nine surveys fielded to date.

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/video/TechTalk-Analyst-Jon-Toigo-discusses-tape-media-today

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/video/TechTalk-Analyst-Jon-Toigo-discusses-tape-media-today



Home










About us

About the Quality AwardsThe Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven

their quality and reliability in actual use. Results are derived from a survey of qualified readers who assess products in five

main categories: sales-force competence, initial product quality, product features, product reliability and technical support. Our

methodology incorporates statistically valid polling that eliminates market share as a factor. Indeed, our objective is to identify

the most reliable products on the market regardless of vendor name, reputation or size. Products are rated on a scale of 1.00 to

8.00, where 8.00 is the best score. A total of 321 respondents provided 473 tape library evaluations.

Products in the survey: The following vendors/model lines of enterprise-class and midrange tape libraries were included in this

Quality Awards survey. The total number of responses for each finalist is shown in parentheses.

ENTERPRISE n Hewlett-Packard ESL/EML Series (44)n IBM TS3400/TS3500/TS4500 (67)n Oracle StorageTek SL3000/SL8500 (32)n Overland Storage NEO 8000 Series*n Quantum Scalar i500/i2000/i6000 (34)n Spectra Logic T950 or T-Finity*

MIDRANGE

n Dell PowerVault Tape Backup 124T, TL2000/TL4000 or ML6000 Series (78)n Hewlett-Packard MSL Series (86)n IBM TS3100/TS3200/TS3310 (55)n Oracle StorageTek SL150 (19)n Overland Storage NEO 200s/400s, NEO 2000e Series/NEO 4000e Series*n Quantum Scalar i40/i80*n Spectra Logic T50/T120/T200/T380/T680*n Tandberg Data StorageLibrary T24/T40/T80/T120/T160 or StorageLoader Series (21)

* RECEIVED TOO FEW RESPONSES TO BE INCLUDED AMONG THE FINALISTS


THERE ARE A myriad of data protection appliances available, many of which defy the early definition of a purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA). Today, there are at least four types of data protection appliances:

n (Real) backup appliances: Includes both the backup engine and some amount of storage.

n Storage/Deduplication appliances: Target devices that are fed by backup/archive software or directly from some production platforms.

n Business continuity/Disaster recovery (BC/DR) or

failover appliances: Similar to backup appliances, but

along with the backup engine and data is a hypervisor or other means to resume functionality without restoring locally or via the cloud.

n Cloud gateway appliances: Similar to storage appli-ances, they are fed from an outside source but seamlessly offer cloud capacity in what appears to be local disk storage. Cloud gateway appliances somewhat resemble virtual tape libraries (VTLs) from a few years back.

Twenty years ago, everyone wanted better performance and reliability than what tape could offer at the time, but backup software could not directly interface with disk systems. So, some vendors created VTLs, disk systems that appeared to be tape libraries. Backup software knew how to access tape, and thus disk-based backup became commonplace.

Today, many folks want the economics of cloud, but not all backup software can write directly to the cloud. Some vendors are creating cloud gateways, hybrid cloud solutions that present cloud storage as if it were a local disk system. And because backup software now knows how to write to disk systems, cloud-based backup moves several steps forward.

In both cases, the storage market led a data protection evolution to a new medium by way of emulation.

There are some differences, of course. The goal of

HOT SPOTS JASON BUFFINGTON

Are cloud gateways the new VTLs?Cloud gateways offer great benefits, but they could go the way of the VTL without innovation from vendors.

Home










About us

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/data-protection-appliances-are-better-than-pbbas/

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/Understanding-your-options-for-virtual-tape-library-solutions

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/Understanding-your-options-for-virtual-tape-library-solutions

http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/tip/Disk-based-backup-trends-and-technologies

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Various-cloud-gateway-options-and-use-cases

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tutorial/Cloud-backup-best-practices-A-tutorial-on-evaluating-cloud-data-backup-services


moving to disk is heightened performance and reliability, while the aim of going to the cloud is an increase in eco-nomics and site durability. But economics shouldn’t come at the expense (pun intended) of what disk still brings to-day in performance/reliability, so good cloud gateways are focused on solving the latency problem of cloud services through a combination of deduplication/compression within the appliance, as well as serious WAN optimization technology for the network transmission.

To be clear, I’m an advocate of cloud gateways because not everyone is ready to throw out every part of their exist-ing backup solution to go to a backup-as-a-service (BaaS) offering. Instead, folks can extend their data protection strategy to the cloud, while keeping their currently de-ployed backup agents and backup servers with scheduled jobs. Additionally, staff requires little to no additional training because backup operations remain the same; the cloud gateway drops right into the existing environment.

Like most other IT evolutions, after a few years of this approach, users may choose to move further down that road. But because it’s difficult to imagine any data cen-ter-grade cloud solution that doesn’t require a local copy for fast restores, a disk-extended-to-cloud model makes sense for the long haul—and cloud gateways offer that now.

However, because some cloud gateways only appear as disk, the backup software can’t leverage any additional agility or capabilities that come from the cloud repository itself. Some backup software vendors are moving past that and developing software that can write data directly to cloud repositories, much like those vendors that stopped

relying on VTL emulation and began writing to disk sys-tems natively. But those solutions must integrate with and manage each medium (local disk, tape and cloud storage) asynchronously.

There is a perception that VTL is an antiquated meth-odology that doesn’t wholly utilize the features of the native medium (disk), but it’s still widely deployed. It took 15 years for VTLs to be mostly displaced by native disk access methods (CIFS, NFS and API), but it’s unlikely backup vendors will take nearly that long to fully embrace cloud-access protocols.

So the questions for cloud storage gateway vendors are as follows:

n Can you offer gateways with deduplication that is on par with other local disk solutions and differentiate your products with features such as superior WAN optimization?

n Does your product offer optimized local storage, and also fully enable the utilization of cloud storage features?

Vendors that don’t innovate beyond the initial emula-tion scenario should expect the same long-term fate as VTL. For those that do continue to innovate with ever- broadening cloud-centric integration features in mind, gateways are as interesting in the long term as they are attractive and immediately usable in the short term. n

JASON BUFFINGTON is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. He blogs at CentralizedBackup.com and tweets as @Jbuff.

Home










About us

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Four-network-latency-gotchas-of-private-cloud

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineContent/Challenges-with-data-protection-in-the-cloud

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineContent/Challenges-with-data-protection-in-the-cloud

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/Review-of-protocols-for-cloud-services-Part-1

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/Review-of-protocols-for-cloud-services-Part-1

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240226004/Cloud-storage-gateways-blending-into-major-storage-systems

http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/tip/Cloud-gateways-for-primary-storage-Benefits-and-challenges

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Designing-a-long-term-cloud-application-integration-strategy

http://centralizedbackup.com/

https://mobile.twitter.com/Jbuff

REFERENCE ARCHITECTURES HAVE always been important, but in this era of software–defined everything, they play a much bigger role for IT and systems integrators. But the first step is to define the term reference architecture. I checked out Wikipedia for a definition and pulled out a couple of key passages to explain its meaning (I added the italics for emphasis):

n “A reference architecture in the field of software archi-tecture or enterprise architecture provides a template solution for an architecture for a particular domain. It also provides a common vocabulary with which to discuss implementations, often with the aim to stress commonality.”

n “Adopting a reference architecture within an organiza-tion accelerates delivery through the re-use of an effective solution and provides a basis for governance to ensure the consistency and applicability of technology use within an organization.”

Let me put these excerpts in perspective by using a few examples.

Before the software-defined storage (SDS) era, when you might buy a VNX storage array from EMC, all the soft-ware and hardware came from EMC. If you bought repli-cation, thin provisioning and snapshot software, you were assured it would all work together. EMC was dealing with a contained set of products and controlled all of them. But EMC still provided you with a set of guidelines to ensure you got the best experience from the implementation. Also, they likely provided several reference architectures that described what to do/not to do, and how to configure the servers and network switches to get a certain level of performance for a given application, such as SAP. Even when EMC controlled all aspects of storage, there was still a need for reference architectures.

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE

AIDED BY REFERENCE ARCHITECTURES

Now let’s take an example of a classic SDS product and see

READ/WRITE ARUN TANEJA

Why reference architectures matterSoftware-defined and hyper-converged storage don’t eliminate the need for vendor reference architectures.


Home










About us

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Software-defined-storage-Making-sense-of-the-data-storage-technology

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Whats-the-best-way-to-implement-products-from-software-defined-storage-vendors


how a reference architecture becomes even more import-ant. DataCore SANsymphony was probably the industry’s first example of software-defined storage. SANsymphony logically sat in front of a wide variety of arrays from differ-ent vendors, and was designed to maximize utilization and bring uniformity to the mish-mash of functionality built into each array. Some arrays might have been overused while others were underutilized; functionality varied and even if they performed the same function, they performed it differently. SANsymphony corralled the disparate hard-ware and provided a common way of delivering storage services. DataCore probably limited support to a set of products defined in a hardware compatibility list. In add-ition, the firm likely provided a set of guidelines, based on its own experience and the experiences of its cus-tomers. It possibly also supplied certain reference archi-tectures for specific application areas. These reference architectures were more critical than those supplied by array vendors, providing templates, sets of guidelines and best practices.

HYPER-CONVERGED SYSTEM USERS

NEED GUIDANCE, TOO

Even in the case of hyper-converged appliances—where compute, storage, networking, server virtualization, data protection, WAN optimization, data deduplication and other technologies are all built into a single node—there’s still a need for a reference architecture. Convergence and hyper-convergence are designed to make infrastructure deployment and day-to-day management easier. But

vendors of those products provide reference architectures for a variety of applications and deployment sizes so users can reap the benefits of convergence quickly. Of course, a key feature of hyper-convergence is flexibility, so if per-formance isn’t adequate, you can add another node. But initial design still matters, and some of those issues can be resolved by having the right reference architecture for a given application or mix of applications.

Eventually, I believe hyper-converged vendors will de-velop specific models for targeted workloads of a particu-lar size and users will simply pick the right model without having to worry about reference architectures. But until we get there, reference architectures matter.

TRIED, TESTED AND TRUE

Reference architectures are templates of what works well together for specific use cases; they inject the experience of developers and users so new users don’t stray down blind alleys. Reference architectures encompass best prac-tices, cite dependencies, warn you if certain combinations are problematic and accelerate delivery of results from an IT infrastructure.

Reference architectures have always been important to IT. But with software-defined everything, the number of potential interactions becomes infinitely greater and the need for a reference architecture increases accordingly. n

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

Home










About us

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/feature/DataCore-SANsymphony-V-R903

http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Reference-architectures-bring-appliance-feel-to-hyper-converged-systems

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/reference-architecture

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/reference-architecture



TechTarget Storage Media Group

STORAGE MAGAZINEVP EDITORIAL/STORAGE MEDIA GROUP Rich CastagnaSENIOR MANAGING EDITOR Kim HefnerASSOCIATE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Ellen O’BrienSENIOR SITE EDITOR Andrew BurtonCONTRIBUTING EDITORS James Damoulakis, Steve Duplessie, Jacob GsoedlDIRECTOR OF ONLINE DESIGN Linda Koury

SEARCHSTORAGE.COMSEARCHCLOUDSTORAGE.COM SEARCHVIRTUALSTORAGE.COMASSOCIATE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Ellen O’BrienSENIOR NEWS DIRECTOR Dave RaffoSENIOR NEWS WRITER Sonia R. LeliiSENIOR WRITER Carol SliwaSTAFF WRITER Garry KranzSENIOR MANAGING EDITOR Kim HefnerSITE EDITOR Sarah WilsonASSISTANT SITE EDITOR Erin Sullivan

SEARCHDATABACKUP.COM SEARCHDISASTERRECOVERY.COM SEARCHSMBSTORAGE.COM SEARCHSOLIDSTATESTORAGE.COMSENIOR SITE EDITOR Andrew BurtonMANAGING EDITOR Ed HannanSTAFF WRITER Garry Kranz

STORAGE DECISIONS TECHTARGET CONFERENCESEDITORIAL EVENTS ASSISTANT Erin Sullivan

SUBSCRIPTIONSwww.SearchStorage.com

STORAGE MAGAZINE275 Grove Street, Newton, MA [email protected]

TECHTARGET INC. 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466www.techtarget.com

©2014 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

COVER IMAGE AND PAGE 8: ZOZULINSKYI /FOTOLIA

Home










About us

http://reprints.ygsgroup.com/m/techtarget

STORAGE - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/.../StoragemagOnlineDEC2014.pdfSTORAGE • DECEMBER 2014 3...

Documents

Transcript of STORAGE - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/.../StoragemagOnlineDEC2014.pdfSTORAGE • DECEMBER 2014 3...