Network Appliances Ease Storage Management - Industry Trend or Event

ENT, Jan 12, 2000 by Thomas Sullivan

STORAGE IS THE FASTEST GROWING SEGMENT OF THE IT INDUSTRY. WITH DOT-COM COMPANIES AND TRADITIONAL BRICK-AND-MORTAR COMPANIES SIMULTANEOUSLY BUILDING THEIR PRESENCE ON THE Web, storage growth is likely to continue well into the next century.

Market research firm Robert Frances Group Inc. (RFG, www.rfgonline.com) predicts that 70 cents of every new IT equipment investment dollar will be spent on storage, in one form or another.

Storage itself is growing in importance and prevalence, but so are the means by which companies store data. Among the emerging technologies is a relatively new breed of network storage devices known as network appliances.

"We're at the precipice of a major change in the storage market," says Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing for the storage products division at Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com). "Storage appliances absolutely play an important role."

Although network appliances come in several flavors, such as e-mail and Web appliances, most systems on the market are designed for use as network attached storage (NAS) systems.

Jeff Helthall, vice president of marketing and sales at CrosStor Software Inc. (www.crosstor.com), which manufactures an operating system for network appliances, says vendors design their products with the goal of being as easy to use as a VCR -- at least in the sense that network appliances are single function products with little to administer.

"There is a new paradigm shift occurring in which network devices are becoming more like appliances, and thus a lot easier to use -- similar to the ease-of-use shift from Unix to NT," he says.

Devices dubbed network appliances are designed for one task, and usually only one task. But other vendors, such as tape library vendors, are jumping into the fray and labeling their devices network-attachable, as well.

Elise Ward, program manager for software engineering, storage automation and solutions at Exabyte Corp. (www.exabyte.com), says some storage vendors are calling tape libraries network-attachable, and that any library with an Ethernet port can theoretically be considered a NAS device. Tape libraries, though they can be used for network attached storage, are not network appliances.

A network appliance is supposed to handle one task, rather than being all things to all people, as general purpose servers are designed to be. Network appliances are also designed to be easier to use than other storage devices, such as tape libraries.

The notion that any network device is as easy to use as a household appliance is a bold claim. In fact, it may be! a bit too bold, at least for the time being. But network appliances are succeeding, and one of the reasons is their ease of installation and use.

Gersham Meharg, the CTO at eTunnels Inc. (www.etunnels.com), which builds an Internet-based personal portable network, says his company implemented a network appliance this past July and had it up and running by the end of August.

The company's director of network operations, Jovito Salonga, says customization added to the overall implementation time.

"With our applications, there was a lot of customization and tweaking on the server end, so installing the network appliance was not as turnkey as some people might think it would be, but it really is pretty easy," he says.

Advantages

Even if network appliances are not literally as easy to use as a VCR, they do provide a number of advantages.

"NAS devices are a highly efficient, low-cost file servers that are easy to deploy, easy to manage, and really require very little IT resources," says Robert Gray, research director, storage systems, at International Data Corp. (IDC, www.idc.com).

NAS devices increase network performance by taking backup off the LAN, thereby eliminating pesky I/O bottlenecks. The devices also have the potential to automate tasks -- such as mirroring and off-site data storage -- that are not trivial or intellectually simple. Further, network appliances can help companies consolidate data and control data growth.

Ebsco Publishing Inc. (www.epnet.com), an online service for libraries that helps people research via the Internet, outgrew its storage two years ago. The company maintains a database of nearly 10 million magazine and periodical articles dating back to 1984. To manage this data, the company started with one NAS appliance, and has added three more since.

Because the company's data doubles every year and because the company has a worldwide user base that doubles every year, according to CEO Michael Gorrell, Ebsco needed a solution that was both easy to implement and easy to scale up.

"Having scaleable equipment is very, very, important to us, and it has to be easy to use," he says.

Another benefit to using network attached storage is immediacy. Unlike storage area networks (SANs), which require considerably more planning and implementation, NAS devices can be purchased, hooked up to the network, and used right away -- whether a company is installing its first network appliance or adding more storage.