Getting the Most Out of Your Storage Network

1
Getting the Most Out of Your Storage Network

• Nick Allen
• VP and Research Director
• Gartner Inc.
• Storage Decisions
• Chicago, September 10th 2003

2
Agenda

• How do you provide capacity on demand without
  overbuying storage?
• Is there an effective way to combine the
  strengths and cost advantages of Fibre Channel,
  SCSI and ATA disks in an integrated
  infrastructure?
• What are the pros and cons of mixing Fibre
  Channel and IP networks for storage?
• How do you leverage new technology without adding
  to management overhead?

3
Agenda

• How do you provide capacity on demand without
  overbuying storage?
• Is there an effective way to combine the
  strengths and cost advantages of Fibre Channel,
  SCSI and ATA disks in an integrated
  infrastructure?
• What are the pros and cons of mixing Fibre
  Channel and IP networks for storage?
• How do you leverage new technology without adding
  to management overhead?

4
The Fundamentals of Negotiating

• Never purchase under time pressure
• Use a dual-supplier policy wherever feasible
• Dont allow a vendor to bypass the technical
  staff
• Align the deal time with the vendors timings and
  sales incentive programs
• Dont show enthusiasm
• Always obtain line-item pricing
• Lean toward purchase rather than standard lease
  if upgrades or extension are planned
• Destroy the self-confidence of the sales
  representative

5
Everything Is Negotiable

• Hardware
• Initialacquisition
• Upgrades
• Software
• OTC discounts
• Blended bids
• ProfessionalServices
• SAN Design
• Data Migration
• Conversions
• Maintenance
• Warranty
• Discounts

100
80
Nonhardware
60
40
Hardware
20
0
01
02
03
04
05
06
6
Emerging Costs

• SAN Fabric
• HBAs and path managment
• Network
• DR and BC
• SAN management software
• Access protection software
• Lock-in effect
• Virtualization file systems
• SRM Software
• ILM Software

7
Disk Subsystem Pricing
Month
8
Residual Value vs. Technological Life

• The annual price erosion will continue with at
  least 30-50 percent
• The cost are shifting into storage features and
  storage management.
• Current product cycles are 18 to 24 months
• Maintenance becomes prohibitively expensive after
  two cycles
• Products more than two cycles old are
  economically obsolete
• Upgrades are uneconomical after one cycle if the
  warranty is not extended

9
Consolidated Disk Storage

• SAN, NAS or High-End Enterprise
• Larger investment in procurement, but
• Better use of spare capacity, flexible LUN
  sizes with dynamic reconfiguration
• Improved availability, performance, security and
  disaster recovery
• Ability to consolidate and automate backups, tape
  libraries
• Multi-platform data transfer and new file systems
• More efficient access, sharing and distribution
  of information throughout the enterprise
• Lower storage management costs

10
When to Acquire? Big Steps or Small?

• What to consider
• Price erosion
• Vendor upgrade granularity
• Software bands granularity
• Operation disruptions
• Faster utilization of spare capacity
• RFP overhead
• Contract administration overhead

70
60
50
40
30
20
TB
10
0
1
2
3
4
Years
11
How scalable is scalable?

• Issues
• Limited warranties
• High maintenance costs
• Deflationary H/W market
• Growing software costs

• Strategies
• 36-month service life and warranty
• Line-item, forward-priced upgrades not-to-exceed
• Buy within first 12-18 months
• Rigorous TCO analysis

12
New Financing Models

• Standard lease
• Subsystem storage costs are spread equally over
  the lifecycle of the lease (flat rate).
• Match situation when storage requirements are not
  growing or grows by new lease or purchase of
  additional subsystems
• Pay per forecast
• This model is designed for users with constant,
  continuous and predictable growth rates.
• Instead of paying flat leasing rates up front,
  the monthly lease payments are made according to
  the usesage forecast

13
New Financing Models (contd)

• Capacity on demand or pay per use This
  utility model is best suited for users with
  unpredictable storage demands.
• Emerging metering metering applications extract
  usage data at regular intervals from the
  customers storage devices. Usage data is
  averaged and the customer receives a monthly bill
  based on average usage.
• Capacity-on-demand considerations
• Speed of activation
• Dynamic activation?
• Coverage of temporary peak demands.
• Challenges to overcome
• Variable cost vs. static budget
• Tracking peaks
• Measurement rationale

14
Storage Management Costs

• Up to 1 4 ratio between cost of capacity and
  cost of storage management (most of costs are
  labor costs)
• Required manpower to manage
• Distributed storage 500GB/manager
• Central location but not consolidated 600GB/mgr.
  to 800GB/mgr.
• Multiplatform consolidated storage 2,000GB/mgr.
  to 4,000GB/mgr.
• Future
• Increase in personal costs
• Data capacity explosion

15
Agenda

• How do you provide capacity on demand without
  overbuying storage?
• Is there an effective way to combine the
  strengths and cost advantages of Fibre Channel,
  SCSI and ATA disks in an integrated
  infrastructure?
• What are the pros and cons of mixing Fibre
  Channel and IP networks for storage?
• How do you leverage new technology without adding
  to management overhead?

16
ATA Penetration for Multi-User Applications
K Units
17
ATA vs. SCSI Disk Performance
ATA
SCSI
SCSI/ATA
ATA/SCSI
7,200
15,000
208
48
Test/Spec
RPM
8
8
100
100
Cache on Drive (MB)
45.5
64.7
142
70
HDTach
Sequential Read (Average MB/sec.)
27.7
42.6
154
65
HDTach
Sequential Write (Average MB/sec.)
13
5.7
44
228
HDTach
Random Access Time (ms)
150
360
240
42
IOMeter
Desktop I/Os per Second
424
177
42
240
IOMeter
Desktop Average Response Time (ms)
143
408


285
35
IOMeter
Web Server I/Os per Second
Web Server Average Response Time (sec.)
6.18
2.508
41
246
IOMeter
600
1,200
200
50
MTBF (Thousands of Hours)
8
24
300
33
Duty Cycle (Hours per Day)
18
ATA Disk as a Cache Buffer
19
DTD DTDT
Function
Category
Company
Product
Comments
20
Agenda

• How do you provide capacity on demand without
  overbuying storage?
• Is there an effective way to combine the
  strengths and cost advantages of Fibre Channel,
  SCSI and ATA disks in an integrated
  infrastructure?
• What are the pros and cons of mixing Fibre
  Channel and IP networks for storage?
• How do you leverage new technology without adding
  to management overhead?

21
Storage Network Infrastructure

• The Fibre Channel SAN component market continues
  to consolidate dramatically will new switch
  vendors finally reverse the trend?
• iSCSI tentatively explores a complementary market
  and waits for the 10 Gbps performance kick
• Native InfiniBand storage is generally off the
  map for storage networking
• Vendors of competing technologies (falsely) blame
  economic factors for slow market progress
• The 10-Gbps convergence will likely be a no-show

22
Why 4-Gbps FC Infrastructure?

• Ask the server providers, not the storage system
• OEM customers
• Increasing SAN awareness on part of servers
• Switching support of 4-Gbps connections for
  servers
• 10-Gbps connections for storage systems
• Existing standards-based backward compatibility
• Favorable incremental costs of connecting a
  server to a SAN
• Technology upgrade without price premium
• Implementation in low-cost copper
• Better match to available buses in 2004

23
IP versus Fibre Channel Scenarios

• The market for iSCSI and IP block storage will
  evolve as a complement to FC in the market where
  lower cost and enhanced connectivity is paramount
  (0.7 probability)
• Competition for next-generation SAN
  infrastructure will play out on a level playing
  field with a common 10-Gbps physical layer for
  both Ethernet and Fibre Channel (0.3 probability)

24
SAN FC Switch Magic Quadrant
Leaders
Challengers

• Emerging Players
• Sanera
• Sandial
• Maranti
• Maxxan
• Others?

Ability to Execute
As of April 2003
Visionaries
Niche Players
Completeness of Vision
25
Hosted by
Would you be willing to change your Fibre Channel
Switch vendor?

• Yes
• No
• Maybe
• Unknown
• Already did it
• Already a mixed shop

Cross-Tab Label
0 / 500
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iSCSI Progress

Probability of occurring by
year-end Event 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Mean
ingful, approved and open industry standards for
iSCSI .6 .8 .9 1.0 1.0 1.0 Proven, affordable
TOE cards .5 .7 .8 .9 1.0 1.0available with
IPSec Widespread availability of low-cost
.5 .7 .9 1.0 1.0Gigabit Ethernet Widespread
driver support for iSCSI .5 .7 .9 1.0Widespre
ad availability of storage .5 .7 .9 1.0subsyst
ems supporting iSCSI Widespread availability of
fully tested, .5 .8 .9interoperable,
certifiable homogeneous iSCSInetworks and
storage systems Same as above heterogeneous
environments .5 .7 .8 Larger Ethernet packets
(nice to have) .6
27
Number of SAN-Attached Servers
28
Fibre Channel Link and SAN Extension
SAN Extenders
Fibre Channel SAN Island
ATM/IP/DWDM/SONET
Fibre Channel SAN Island
SAN Extenders
29
iSCSI Gateways Between IP and FC
Storage Systems
Hosts With iSCSI Cards
Fibre Channel
Ethernet
Gateway/Router
30
Agenda

• How do you provide capacity on demand without
  overbuying storage?
• Is there an effective way to combine the
  strengths and cost advantages of Fibre Channel,
  SCSI and ATA disks in an integrated
  infrastructure?
• What are the pros and cons of mixing Fibre
  Channel and IP networks for storage?
• How do you leverage new technology without adding
  to management overhead?

31
Storage Hype Cycle
32
Real Time Storage Infrastructure
1980s
1990s
2000-2005
2006-2010
Direct-AttachedStorage (DAS)
The AutomatedStorage Utility
Networked Storage
InternalServer Storage

• Storage is a peripheral to the server
• Much manual administration
• Poor asset utilization

• External high availability, fault-tolerant
  storage
• Some sharing, but mostly DAS
• Much manual administration
• Poor asset utilization

• More productive storage administration
• Storage networks, pools, virtualization, event
  consoles, some automated provisioning
• Separately managed processes, services, devices
  and media

• Autonomic active management
• Policy-based management
• Full-scope automated provisioning
• Effective root-cause analysis
• Self-healing storage services
• Service views via auto discovery
• Storage asset optimization

33
SAN Management Magic Quadrant
Challengers
Leaders
.
EMC
.
.
Veritas
.
Ability toExecute
.
.
HP
.
.
McData
Creekpath
.
.
InterSAN
IBM
Storability
.
Fujitsu
CA
SUN
As of April 2003
Niche Players
Visionaries
Completeness of Vision
34
Initial Storage Provisioning Magic Quadrant
35
SRM Magic Quadrant
Key CA Computer Associates International HP Hew
lett-Packard Precise Precise Software Sun Sun
Microsystems Veritas Veritas Software
36
Storage Management Wars
StorageManagement Revenue
Veritas
EMC
1billion
IBM
HP
Cloud cover turbulence zone
500million
CA
Sun
Princeton Softech
Legato
Tek-Tools
200 million
Northern Parklife
Arkivio
DeepFile
Fujitsu Softek
CommVault
AppIQ
OuterBay
McDATA
Bakbone
Astrum
FilesX
Storability
10 million
CreekPath
InterSAN
Teracloud
37
Recommendations

• Buy storage, not visions
• Negotiate everything and get creative
• Deploy ATA-based systems carefully
• Plan for Fibre Channel to remain the dominant
  high-performance technology for SANs from 2 to
  10 Gbps
• Choose FC link extenders and SAN extenderswith
  careful consideration of requirements
• Plan for IP storage technology to provide
  lower-costand extended-connectivity solutions
• Continue to view all SAN management and ASAM
  purchases as tactical