SME storage arrays like the AberSAN Z-Series pack solid enterprise-class features

It’s never been a better time to be in the market for enterprise storage products, with many excellent options available at affordable prices. But the market can be confusing for the uninitiated, with a variety of network options and capabilities. Even those of us “in the know” about enterprise storage are sometimes surprised by the offerings and companies in this space! So when Jerome Wendt from DCIG approached me to collect data for a market overview and buyer’s guide, I was excited. It was my big chance to really get to know these products!

Dividing the Storage Market

An enterprise storage array is a strategic investment, with prices often reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there are smaller arrays as well, and these aren’t just stripped-down cheapies: Midrange storage arrays are emerging as serious challengers for the high-end enterprise arrays, and even the small array segment is improving. Long the home of simple RAID systems, small enterprise storage arrays are now full-featured systems with advanced integration and features.

This is the segment of the storage market I was eager to take a look at: The small-enterprise arrays, ranging in price from $5,000 to $30,000 and capacity from a few terabytes to over one hundred (with expansion shelves). To keep it sensible, I eliminated systems with less than 8 hard disk drives (since they really couldn’t deliver the IOPS needed for a production application) and those that can’t be shared using storage networking protocols like iSCSI, Fibre Channel, or NAS. This left a great cross-section, including small systems from big players like EMC, NetApp, Dell, and HP as well as smaller companies like Drobo, Aberdeen, StoneFly, and Promise.

Little Systems With Big Capabilities

Gathering data for this buyer’s guide entailed creating a master list of all the features any of the systems might have and then filling in the blanks with vendor input and public information. Although I felt that my list of questions was comprehensive, I was amazed to find that the available systems exceeded even my expectations. For example, I was surprised to see 10 GbE support in more than 1/3 of the arrays I looked at, yet only 1/4 of them included NAS protocols. Amazingly, every NAS system also supported iSCSI, meaning unified storage dominates the SME array market!

DCIG likes to rank the systems listed in their buyer’s guides, so it was left to me to come up with weights and scores. I decided to score each feature on a 1 to 5 scale based on my own expectations: A feature I was surprised by (more than 4 GB of cache, for example) got a 5 while one that was conspicuously absent (scalability beyond internal drives) got a 1. An average system would get all 3′s, but there really were no average systems!

I then weighted the features based on how relevant they are to small enterprise IT. Features like scalability (drives), data protection (RAID 6), and reliability (redundant power supplies and dual controllers) received more weight than less-critical things like ROHS compliance and even multi-pathing.

After all this work, we boiled down the scores to categories (controller, capacity, support, etc) and finally a single overall score. I was surprised at the results, really. I hadn’t spent much time with Aberdeen or StoneFly prior to this experience, but came away impressed by their products. The strong showing of EMC’s new VNXe and NetApp’s FAS2020 was as I had expected, but the D-Link DSN-5110, Dell’s PowerVault MD3200i, HP’s P2000, and the Promise and Winchester arrays caught me off-guard. These really-capable systems at low prices and should be on buyers’ short-lists!

Stephen’s Stance

I tried to put myself in the place of the buyer evaluating these systems, but of course every buyer will have his own priorities. Perhaps in the future we will make the raw data available so they can make their own ranking and determine which array works best for them. I will work with DCIG to make this happen, since the feature-focused rankings used this time aren’t right for everyone.

I have been working on this guide for almost a year now, and think the finished product really shines. I hope it will help buyers come up with a list of products to consider, and also that it helps the smaller vendors get some attention in this crowded space. Due to their strong showing, Aberdeen has licensed the guide and made it available for free (after registration) on their web site.

Download the guide and see for yourself!

Note that Aberdeen did not “sponsor” the creation of the guide: DCIG paid Foskett Services to create it with no sponsor in mind, I alone gathered the data, and our ranking and editing was finished before Aberdeen or any other vendor got involved financially. No one was more surprised than me by the strong showing of their AberSAN storage system, though the fact that it features Nexenta’s excellent software piqued my interest. Some have criticized DCIG’s guides and methodology in the past, but I personally stand behind this effort. I will happily answer any questions – just leave a comment here!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Which Small Enterprise Storage Arrays Are Worth Considering?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I have seen this straw man argument set up by so many throughout my career that it has become laughably predictable. Every time a new high or low point is set for enterprise storage cost, someone is there pointing out that a bunch of disk drives is vastly cheaper. Let’s call this the Dumb Disk Fallacy: Only a fool would claim that dumb disks are comparable to enterprise storage.

Are we supposed to be surprised that raw materials make up such a small percent of the cost of an integrated system? One can prepare a delicious meal at home using supermarket-bought ingredients for a quarter the cost of a restaurant outing. A single glass of wine at a bar often costs as much as a whole bottle at the store, yet the restaurant industry is holding on even through a recession.

Lack of expertise only one factor: Even one who can not whip up a soufflé can certainly boil some spaghetti, warm up some sauce, and pour a glass of Chianti! Convenience is another driver, since many lack the time required to shop and cook. But there are other benefits as well: Dining out is a social activity and restaurant meals allow us to sample unfamiliar cuisine. Clearly, there are many reasons for one to pay far more for a finished product than for the ingredients it contains.

The same is true of enterprise storage. Although they make up a significant proportion of the bulk of a given storage array, hard disk drives are often a small element in the overall cost. One does not price a salad by its lettuce or a lasagne by its pasta, after all. Modern enterprise storage systems are defined their capabilities, ranging from performance to reliability to flexibility. Indeed, core components like disk drives and processors have long since been commoditized, and many vendors are leveraging much larger-scale commodity subsystems these days. The day will soon come when major vendors will differentiate entire product lines based solely on the software they run.

Now, it is possible to build very cheap storage systems, and the price of these can even approach the raw disk cost. But finished storage systems will never be as cheap as just a bunch of disks (JBOD, for newbies), because of the following:

1. Disk arrays include lots of hardware components beyond disk drives – chassis, power supplies, controllers (complete with CPUs, RAM, etc), and cabling and connectors
2. Data must be protected using extra disk capacity for parity, mirrors, snapshots, and spares
3. Arrays include software to orchestrate the whole operation; even free software requires development, testing, and integration
4. Support and maintenance contracts are required for any production system
5. Supporting software is often a requirement, too, for configuration, operation, management, and integration with servers and applications
6. The companies selling the array deserve a bit of profit or they’ll go out of business and your support contract won’t be worth much
7. Don’t forget utilization: A half-empty disk costs twice as much as a full one, and it is awfully hard to make use of 100% of available capacity without a storage network of some kind

So how close to “dumb disk” can a production storage system get? Google’s is probably the closest: They use custom server boards, custom chassis, custom power supplies, custom racks, and low-end disk drives to keep hardware costs at a minimum; the entire thing is composed of commodity components, too; the array software is all written and supported in-house for very low overhead; the capacity is very highly utilized due to the inherent flexibility of the applications they support. So Google has attacked every one of these areas in an effort to drive out costs. But would it really be practical for folks other than Google to invent, construct, and run their own storage system?

Instead of dreaming about building our own storage solution, let’s look at the spectrum of storage available to the modern enterprise IT shop:

1. Bare disk drives are widely available with a handful of companies producing just a few different models. The idiosyncracies of these are interesting to some, but a hard disk drive is useless alone
2. Direct-attached storage offerings range from single-drive USB-connected external disks to multi-drive racks, yet these too are useless without a server to drive them. These normally lack any sort of intelligence or advanced features and quite a bit of effort is required to ensure acceptable levels of performance or reliability. But so-called JBOD or DAS storage can be incredibly cheap to purchase.
3. True storage arrays range from the most basic home NAS boxes to the most advanced enterprise systems. All are purchased primarily for their features, with price tags merely differentiating between competitive offerings. For this reason, storage developers focus the vast majority of their engineering, sales, and marketing efforts on advanced capabilities rather than per-GB cost.
4. Storage as a service is a different realm entirely. Although advances in manageability and utilization and commoditization of hardware allow today’s cloud storage offerings to be offered at very attractive per-GB price points, low cost is merely a welcome side benefit. Engineering and support resources focus almost entirely on enhancing user experience, while hardware is small component of the cost of delivering enterprise-class storage as a managed service.

I’m not an apologist for overpriced enterprise storage, but I recognize that arrays are more than just a collection of disks. I look forward to the day when we finally dispense with the dumb disk fallacy and focus instead on the real value added by enterprise storage innovation. But the realist in me knows that this straw man will continue raising his head for some time to come. I am sure that developments like EMC’s unified CLARiiON and Symmetrix hardware platform, the spread of software appliances on commodity server hardware, and excellent free storage software like Nexenta and FreeNAS will only add fuel to the fire. Therefore I entreat you, dear reader: Do not succumb and pitch disk that is dumb!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | The Dumb Disk Fallacy
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.