Storage Gets Strategic

Software Magazine, June, 2000 by Janet Butler

SANs, NAS, evolve to meet storage management needs

THE ONCE ARCANE SUBJECT OF DMA STORAGE MANAGEMENT is becoming a strategic issue, as organizations increasingly realize that data is their lifeblood. A new generation of business initiatives is fueling massive data growth, overwhelming the current infrastructure for storing and managing it.

Two major storage management technologies are evolving to fill the need: network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN.) While some see the two at odds, others believe that a hybrid form is emerging that encompasses both.

Vendors are tooling up, trying to catch up to organizations' stringent management requirements, and fill a strong market growth opportunity. On the horizon are breakthroughs in storage capacity, and the potential for storage to become a utility.

Coming Into Its Own

"Storage is coming into its own right," says Mike Adams, an analyst at Giga Information Group, Norwell, Mass. Since information is most critical to users, he adds, whatever stores that data is also very critical.

"The management of storage assets and availability is [and has always been] a very important component of companies' ability to provide an available environment for critical applications," says Mark Nicolett, research director, software infrastructure, Gartner Group, based in Stamford, Conn. As systems proliferate within companies, he adds, the amount of data behind each application system is accelerating, and new designs [such as for the Internet] are incorporating accessibility.

So it's not that storage management is becoming more important; it's just becoming more visible, he says.

That visibility stems in part from the unrelenting growth in the volume of enterprise data. Enterprises of all sizes are storing 10 times as much data as they did three years ago, and will have 20 to 50 times more in the next three years, according to Winter Corp., Waltham, Mass.

If storage management is gaining visibility through volume, its growing criticality also results from storage-intensive business applications and initiatives that use detailed and integrated data, such as data warehousing, data mining, customer relationship management, and c-commerce.

Indeed, IDC predicts that Internet-related storage needs will increase 14 times in the next three years. Meta Group research reports that e-commerce and dot-com-centric organizations' storage is growing 10 times faster than traditional businesses; that is, more than 400% annually. Data farms are exceeding 40 to 50 terabytes according to Meta; the equivalent of major world banks.

By the end of 2002, the number of Internet users worldwide is projected at 300 million, according to Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies, Boulder, Colo. Storage recording density has increased nearly 100% every 18 months since 1990, and the price per unit of storage has dropped at about 30% annually throughout the same period. You do the math. Although data volume is growing geometrically, storage capacity is no longer a limiting factor to digital--or other--applications.

A Limiting Factor

Managing their voluminous data growth is a limiting factor to many organizations, however. Take Nortel Networks, whose Ottawa environment was originally engineered for a 4-terabyte footprint, but whose data storage has increased to 20-25 terabytes. "Designers don't delete," notes Roger Dufour, manager of Ottawa Data Management Group, Ottawa, Canada, who sees his main problem as data growth. "We can't keep up with it," he says, though he adds, "we might be able to with SAN technology."

These days, SANs and NAS are the vying technologies for organizations' growing storage management needs. For the past 30 years, each individual computer system has had its own isolated storage environment, creating innumerable islands of information. This made it difficult to manage, protect, or share data.

"Consolidating storage requirements into a single common repository is what SANs are all about," says Jim Rothnie, a senior vice president at EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., whereby organizations mix mainframe, Unix, and NT data in a common platform. He adds that the issues around managing multiple storage systems, multiple connections, and all devices require management software, and that is what constitutes a SAN.

In fact, the mixture of different storage types was the key issue for Jerry Laporte, director of Enterprise Technology Services at Kelly Services Inc., Troy, Mich. "We needed to consolidate [our server-based storage] to better manage our storage farm," he says. Kelly uses Sun boxes for its Oracle platforms and development initiatives, and mostly Dell NT boxes to authenticate Web-based applications, as well as for Lotus Notes, and for a proprietary product.

Kelly chose EMC's Enterprise Storage Network (ESN) for a storage consolidation solution. Since the EMC disk is shared among boxes, it doesn't use as much space. And, with data stored in a central repository, "they chain it so there are no big gaps; no lull time," says Laporte. Back-up without time gaps leaves little doubt about reliability. In addition, while it once took 14 hours to back up the data, it now takes only 8-10 hours, so there's more system availability.