Scaling Storage in a Dot-com World - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

ENT, May 24, 2000 by Stephen Swoyer

Storage: Again with the storage. Such is the bittersweet mantra mouthed by many dot-com IT administrators these days. In an e-commerce space in which storage capacities are increasing faster than Federal Reserve-mandated interest rates, IT managers face the unenviable task of planning a storage infrastructure capable of scaling with the topsy-turvy pace of e-business.

As a rule, storage vendors are quite bullish on the long-term prospects of the information economy. Storage giant EMC Corp. (www.emc.com), for example, cites a recent study by the Marcar Management Institute of America Inc. (www.marcar.com) that pegs the current size of the global information economy at $3.5 trillion; the Marcar report projects the global information economy will nearly tripled to $10.2 trillion by 2010.

According to Robert Gray, research manager for storage systems at market research firm IDC (www.idc.com), storage vendors have good reason to be bullish. By Gray's account, the mechanism that is today driving the global information economy -- the Internet -- is enabled largely by virtue of persistent storage.

"There is no Internet without persistent storage, which provides nothing less than the content of the information economy," Gray explains. "The Internet is only interesting if you can get access to content, and content always resides on persistent storage."

What this likely means for dot-com storage managers, most analysts agree, is that such problems of scale are only likely to get bigger.

IBasis Inc. (www.ibasis.net), a provider of IP telephony services, seems at once to embody both the agony and the ecstasy of today's dot-com enterprise. IBasis enjoys robust growth, counts over 350,000 customer voice mail boxes, and has a lucrative telephony contract in place with MCI WorldCom Inc. (www.wcom.com). The company also has a storage infrastructure that has grown in the space of a few months from zero to 38 TB.

Search engine and Internet portal site Excite Inc. (www.excite.com) has rolled out more than 110 TB of EMC-based storage in just under 20 months, and free e-mail service Critical Path Inc. (www.criticalpath.net) has deployed SO TB of storage in a six-month span. Not to be outdone, Driveway Corp. (www.driveway.com), a site that provides free online storage and other services for end users, rolled out about 40 TB of storage within the space of a single month. The dot-com space abounds with zero-to-multi-TB success stories, and all indications are that the trend will only continue.

Modularizing Storage For ventures like iBasis or Critical Path, scaling an internal storage infrastructure to meet the requirements of the dot-com lifestyle is not easy.

As far as Ajay Joseph, director of network architecture at iBasis, is concerned, the key to developing a scalable storage architecture is modularity: One has to be able to plug a predetermined amount of storage into an environment without affecting system or application processes -- and also be able to remove it just as easily.

"It's difficult to find out bandwidth profiles and user profiles, so we've kind of been in the midst of being conservative and too far out in terms of our sizing requirements for this particular project," Joseph acknowledges. "But the important thing is that we've designed the network so that it's designed for redundancy, and it's been designed for a cell size of 175,000 users. It's very modular, so that you can plug storage into it and take storage out of it as needed."

IDC's Gray points out that most storage vendors today are thinking modularly.

"All storage today is modular," he explains, noting that in the case of organizations that experience fast-paced storage growth, vendors such as IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) or EMC will sometimes "build" surplus storage into an environment. In this model, Gray explains, storage can be "turned on" -- and customers can be billed accordingly for storage capacity increases -- as demand dictates.

NAS For much of its life, network attached storage (NAS) has toiled in the shadows of its bigger, ostensibly beefier cousin: the SAN. SANs are a key tool that storage managers have at their disposal in the race to architect scalable storage infrastructures. But in a dot-com space in which both modularity and plug-and-play expandability are key, dot-com ventures are giving NAS solutions a longer, harder look.

NAS defines an architecture in which a storage subsystem can effectively be plugged into a network. It's that simple. NAS devices typically feature embedded operating systems that provide network-and file system-level support, which means clients and servers of just about any ilk can transparently read from and write to NAS devices on a network. Because it can support a variety of network topologies and interfaces, such as 100 MB Ethernet or even Gigabit Ethernet, NAS can provide a fast, efficient, and modular way to easily add storage to an environment.

IBasis, for example, selected a Symmetrix NAS solution from EMC in place of the latter company's Connectrix solution. Citing concerns about manageability in the SAN space, iBasis' Joseph says a NAS solution also served to better complement the modular approach that his company was taking to storage.