So where’s the focus?
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Storage Management, Application Environments, Advisor - Neil by NeilOff tomorrow to do another trade show … the usual tyre-kickers intermingled with a very intelligent crowd of business people interested in finding out where the future of storage lies.
Trouble is, of course, it depends on what magazine you read, or analyst you listen to, as to what the future holds.
Personally speaking, I’m finding a lot of interest in SAN. It’s a quiet revolution being driven by the Virtual Storage Crowd. If you are gong to virtualise your servers then you’d better put all their storage on a box you can expand, manipulate, mirror etc … not just in direct-attached drives. The fibre market is still prohibitive in cost for the SMB, but iSCSI helps to bring that back to reality.
Of course, there is a big market for direct-attached even in the virtual server world. There are a lot of smaller users who want to run just a few servers on the one piece of hardware and direct-attached storage is fine for them. But as the number of virtual and physical servers increases, and the complexity of the virtual world and server infrastructure grows, so does the pressure to move the storage for VM’s, data and virtual desktop images onto SAN storage where you have better flexibility.
So at the moment it appears it’s the larger end of town that is interested in SAN, with the smaller side of things sticking with direct-attached storage. But for how long? Send me your thoughts on where your organisations are going with SAN vs DAS.
Ciao
Neil
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:24 am
While we have to spend 10K to get an entry level SAN box it’s not exactly going to be entry level kit.
I think the market is ripe for a SAN that is dirt cheap, offers decent disk management and can handle a dozen or so discs as a starter with an seemless upgrade path into the next level of capacity and capability.
We would run a SAN, as that is where we will end up if we get big, but in the meantime it’s all direct storage because it’s cheap and it works. It would be nice to have all the data centralised right now however, and if you were a vendor you wouldn’t lose anything by locking people in sooner rather than later.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Marshall,
Some part of the market is always ready for something “dirt cheap”. I agree there is an entry point in to the SAN market, but is it based around price or organisation size/efficiency?
I would have though 10K was a pretty good entry point for SAN if it comes with disks or you can add off-shelf units (not being tied into expensive vendor-supplied units). Just how low does a SAN have to get before you would consider? (just curious)
Thanks
Neil
June 25th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I spent the first quarter of ‘09 researching iSCSI options. My company is currently implementing an iSCSI SAN from a major manufacturer but, an iSCSI SAN can be had on a budget. My testing of two options in particular showed a lot of promise: The target software from StarWind works pretty well and the open source Openfiler is also a solid option. Anyone considering low end SAN should investigate these and other options if budget is a consideration. They are also a good platform prototyping, testing and training.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Dan,
While I’m not familiar with these particular products, I’d agree that there are good iSCSI solutions out there which give organisations plenty of features at a low price … so are you saying that you are focussed more on SAN storage than DAS?
Regards,
Neil
June 26th, 2009 at 5:18 am
To be honest, I agree that 10K is a fine entry price point. But, if there was an empty SAN box that came in at a price that made it a no brain decision (say 2-5k) that you could populate as your grow, then you have a customer earlier. A customer that you are more likely to be able to sell to in the future because they already run your kit.
June 28th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Marshall,
My only concern with this approach is that in a SAN environment you put all your eggs in one basket. Make sure that your “cheap” SAN protects your data the way you want.
No, I’m not saying that you necessarily get quality because you pay more, but you certainly need to ensure that you are getting good data security from your “cheap” SAN product or you’ll find your whole organisation out to lunch while you get your SAN back up and running.
Regards,
Neil