Managing the information that drives the enterprise

STORAGEMAY 2013 VOL. 12 | NO. 3

ALL-IN-ONE APPLIANCES FOR INSTANT BACKUP

STORAGE MANAGERS SEE THEIR 2013 BUDGETS GROWING (A LITTLE)

CASTAGNA: BYE-BYE BACKUP?

TOIGO: STORAGE HOLY GRAIL: REAL CENTRAL MANAGEMENT

McCLURE: THE OBJECT IS STORAGE

MATCHETT: THE STATE OF SOLID- STATE AFTER FLASH

SNAPSHOT: WIDE USE OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE IN SMALL DOSES

.10 WAYS TO SPEED UP VIRTUAL SERVER STORAGEStorage systems can buckle under the load of multiple virtual servers. These expert tips will help break bottle- necks and up IOPS. PAGE 11

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That makes backup a pretty lucrative endeavor for ven-dors and offers little motivation to disrupt the status quo by doing anything that might simplify or streamline the process.

We can blame ourselves, too. After so many years, we’re set in our ways and just accept that we need spe-cial people with special skills to ensure all that backup hardware and software runs right. There’s definitely a “because that’s the way we do it” mindset when some-one asks why so many copies are made or so much data is backed up. And there’s no denying that changing backup procedures and apps is no small matter, especially if you have a lot of old backup data stashed on tape.

There’s some blame that can be shared among ven-dors and users alike. With the inexorable growth of file data about to put a stranglehold on storage operations in

Backup? Fuggedaboutit!A lot of storage shops are fighting a losing battle when it comes to data protection, with too much data and not enough time. Maybe it’s time to rethink the process.

EDITORIAL  |  RICH CASTAGNA

IT’S 2013 AND we’re still doing backup. I know things tend to toddle along kind of slowly in IT, but the way we protect our data has barely changed at all in my lifetime, and I’m hardly a kid. Backup keeps getting better, of course, with techs like data deduplication

and bigger, faster storage targets to send all that backup data to. But today’s data storage and backup process re-quires essentially the same oversight and administration it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

Few things stagnate like that in the tech universe without a reason, and there are plenty of reasons why backup has been lingering in a time warp for so long. Along with everything else in this world, if you follow the money things start to fall into place and a lot of the mystery disappears. Backup is a complex process involv-ing software, hardware, manpower and special expertise.

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important stuff—is slipping through the cracks. A few companies have even stopped trying to back up every-thing; they just spin off copies of the critical things and keep their fingers crossed about the rest of the data.

It has to be a lot easier than that. Let’s just get rid of backup. The tools and technologies are here, they just need to be better integrated. By now, one would have thought that continuous data protection (CDP) would be an integral part of everybody’s data protection plan, but adoption has been slow. On our most recent Purchasing Intentions survey, only 18% of respondents said they’re using some form of CDP and 13% said they plan to add it to their backup repertoires this year.

The combination of CDP plus snapshots plus rep-lication could be the wonder drug that cures backup’s

EDITORIAL  |  RICH CASTAGNA

many companies, there are probably a lot of storage pros who realize that keeping everything is impractical but still don’t know what data can be ditched. That usually means shops are backing up data that should have been discarded and making multiple copies of useless stuff. Six or seven years ago, a few startup vendors helped de-fine a new storage product category with data classifica-tion products that could help cull the goodies from the garbage. But they were largely ignored and the concept of data classification has mostly gone away, leaving a bunch of backup admins trying to figure out what to keep and what to toss.

Since the great recession put the brakes on a lot of planned storage purchases, data storage managers have learned to use their installed storage as efficiently as pos-sible. Some of that efficiency also shows up in backup op-erations, but not enough to stem the tide of spiraling data stores.

So maybe it’s time to rethink data storage and backup. Just as RAID and erasure coding are built into systems and run virtually unattended after some setup and with a little oversight, backup ought to be far more inte-grated with storage systems and processes. As an exter-nal process, backup isn’t cutting it; many companies are struggling to complete backup jobs before the morn-ing shift arrives or trying to cope with voluminous, mul-tiple backup sets. And with so much pressure and so little time, it’s inevitable that some data—maybe some

A few startup vendors helped definea new storage product category withdata classification products that could help cull the goodies fromthe garbage. But they were largelyignored and the concept of data classification has mostly gone away.

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EDITORIAL  |  RICH CASTAGNA

appropriately for mission-critical data down to user files.There are many more details that you’d need to work

out, but if a decent data protection management app was tossed into the mix, you could keep tabs on the process and be warned if something jumps the tracks at any point.

Backup is tough, but it’s tougher than it should be when it operates in isolation from the rest of a storage system’s processes. A number of startups—as well as es-tablished players—are beginning to address the issue, but the required degree of integration is not yet in sight. But as data continues to grow and storage managers get more desperate for a data protection scheme that works, per-haps storage vendors will pay attention. And maybe then you’ll be able to forget about backup. n

RICH CASTAGNA is editorial director of TechTarget’s Storage Media Group.

ills. Rev up CDP, and without doing anything else, your company’s data gets backed up not in big un-wieldy batches every night, but in little drips and drabs throughout the day. Now what if CDP was built into the storage system’s operating system just like other ser-vices? You might have to turn a few dials to set how fre-quently the new or modified data should be scooped up and where it should be sent, but the process would be nearly invisible and cause far less disruption than tradi-tional backup operations.

Of course, even if backup was tightly integrated and largely unseen, you’d still need to monitor it to make sure it’s doing what you expect it to do. You need to know, for example, that database tables have been copied in a con-sistent manner using Microsoft VSS or a similar tech-nology. You’ll also want to control what gets copied and when, so you’ll need to be able to throttle CDP services

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STORAGE REVOLUTION  |  JON TOIGO

The storage Holy Grail: Ending bifurcated managementStorage virtualization and other storage “uber-controllers” are a step toward better management, but it’s still not an integrated process.

I N AN EARLIER column, I talked about the evolution of storage infrastructure management and the various ways storage services were being aggregated to sim-plify their selective application to specific data as-sets and workloads.

The mainstream approach to managing storage infra-structure has been far from elegant or economical. First, vendors have been evolving their array’s controller boards into full-fledged general-purpose servers, often running a recognizable OS as well as storage-specific applications ranging from proprietary file systems and RAID software to more exotic thin-provisioning or deduplication algo-rithms. The result is a “storage-as-appliance” model that has the advantage of creating sleek, self-contained islands of storage, each managed individually using its own ele-ment management software, but with the downside of

making storage more difficult to manage as it scales.From the perspective of workload and data, appliance

storage was designed more for direct attachment to cer-tain data than for sharing across multiple workloads. An Oracle database needed its own dedicated storage rig, as did Microsoft Exchange and so on. This one-application-one-appliance model worked well until data outgrew rig capacity. Fielding another rig required hiring another ad-ministrator to configure, optimize, manage and trouble-shoot the new island.

Under those circumstances, data storage infrastruc-ture management—managing a fabric of such storage ap-pliances—was (and is) difficult to automate; hence, it’s labor-intensive and costly from both a Capex (cost of specialized gear) and Opex (labor cost) perspective.

An alternative was to virtualize the hardware layer,

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STORAGE REVOLUTION  |  JON TOIGO

abstract value-add functionality away from hardware, thereby reducing both the cost of the hardware and the lock-in to a particular vendor’s rig. Moreover they enable the macro-level management of “storage as a service,” de-livering the means to manage capacity, performance and

data protection holistically. Marketecture like “private storage clouds” or “software-defined storage” are veiled references to these management architectures.

While this new application-facing, service-oriented management approach has been a long time in com-ing, it’s not all that’s needed. Below the layer of ser-vices, capacity and performance is the hardware layer where cabling gets fouled, HBAs die, disk drives fail and solid-state drives burn out. Some folks who have aggre-gated storage rigs with storage hypervisors or other uber-controllers also believe that RAID needs to be done on hardware, so RAID configuration and management at

turning off all the on-box software and placing those ser-vices on a software or hardware uber-controller that op-erated across all spindles in the infrastructure. I noted last time that several software-based uber-controllers are available in the form of storage virtualization software packages or “storage hypervisors” to use the more re-cently coined term. I also highlighted an uber-controller appliance from Tributary Systems called (appropriately enough) the Tributary Storage Director.

Between them, software-based storage hypervisors and hardware-based storage service management appli-ances usurp the on-board value-add software of the stor-age array and surface the functions as services that can be mapped to policies and applied selectively to data. The storage virtualization software approach delivers a cen-tralized way to do this, becoming a “service-enhanced volume delivery engine” or maybe a “storage router” in terms of its function to place data onto spindles where desired services can be most efficiently applied.

The Tributary Systems approach is more federated. While the company’s Storage Director can be clustered (to provide more ports for attaching more client systems and storage arrays), you can set up multiple Storage Di-rectors around your infrastructure as required by storage I/O traffic to facilitate policy-based assignment of storage services to selected data. Managing storage in this config-uration requires polling each Storage Director.

The good thing about the uber-controllers is that they

The good thing about the uber-controllers is that they abstract value-add functionality away from hardware, thereby reducing both the cost of the hardware and the lock-in to a particular vendor’s rig.

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STORAGE REVOLUTION  |  JON TOIGO

what they have done with the protocol thus far. EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and all the knee-nippers and ankle-biters of the storage world also rolled out roadmaps emphasizing REST, but only a few (notably X-IO) have delivered. X-IO shows how SRM and storage service man-agement can be combined using the World Wide Web Consortium standard protocol.

The bottom line is that without an open-standards-based approach to unifying service and plumbing man-agement, it will be significantly more difficult and costly to manage burgeoning storage infrastructures. Cloud storage and software-defined storage marketecture are distractions, and unified storage management (across all vendors’ gear) is far more important than “unified storage.” n

JON WILLIAM TOIGO is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute.

the box or drive-tray level is not covered by service-level management.

That leaves us with a bifurcated management chal-lenge in storage: aggregated services need to be managed and provisioned at the uber-controller, but someone also needs to use conventional storage resource management (SRM) software tools—leveraging connections to discrete devices via proprietary APIs, SNMP MIBs and SMI-S pro-viders—in a desperate effort to see what is happening to I/O in real-time and to oversee the condition of the infra-structure plumbing. If you’re keeping count, that’s two management targets with no unified mechanism for col-lecting and presenting information so that management can advance toward greater automation.

It would be nice if every vendor would do something to implement open REST protocols for management of their arrays, which they sounded enthusiastic about do-ing a few years ago. In 2009, IBM announced it was em-bracing REST with its Project Zero … which is exactly

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COVER STORY  |  STORAGE FOR VMs

By David Davis

10 WAYS TO IMPROVE STORAGE PERFORMANCE FOR VIRTUAL SERVERSVirtual servers can have a profound effect on storage I/O. Here are 10 ways to help ensure that your storage is performing at its best.

ENTERPRISE VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE will always use shared storage. It’s a fact of life—if you want to use the advanced features of VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, all your hosts will need access to the files that make up your virtual machines (VMs). While the latest editions of VM-ware VMotion and Microsoft Live Migration don’t re-quire shared storage, most features like VMware vSphere High Availability and Microsoft Failover Clustering still do (and likely always will).

For the virtual infrastructure (and your critical ap-plications) to perform well, they must be fed the virtual CPU, virtual memory and virtual disk I/O they hunger for. The monitoring of virtual CPU and memory has got-ten easier as hypervisors have made more statistics avail-able and monitoring tools have gotten smarter. However, performance monitoring for virtual infrastructure stor-age is still, in many cases, more of an art than a science. Certainly there are scientific statistics that are analyzed in

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COVER STORY  |  STORAGE FOR VMs

Those tools could be the included VMware esxtop CLI tool, performance graphs inside vCenter (where IOPS are represented as disk.numberRead.summation and disk.numberWrite.summation counters) or commercial tools from third parties. Because vCenter stats must be divided by the sample time to produce IOPS, it can be more work to calculate. Third-party tools (or even VM-ware vCenter Operations Manager) are more costly but are much easier to use and much more intelligent.

Note that, among other things listed below, LUN con-figurations and RAID selection can also have a massive impact on I/O performance.

KNOW YOUR APPLICATIONSWhile storage and virtualization admins have many tools to help churn out more I/O, they’re usually limited in the ways they can

reduce the I/O demand. Also, too many IT pros are more than happy to get knee deep in the weeds of data center infrastructure while totally ignoring the applications run-ning inside.

It’s tough to be successful at truly understanding stor-age performance if you don’t know what your most I/O-intensive applications are, what VMs they run inside, what server clusters they run on and what storage they use. Are the applications read- or write-intensive? Know-ing the answers to these questions will guide you in your

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storage performance, but the difference is that the storage is external to the hypervisor and physical server and, thus, the hypervisor (and your virtualization performance mon-itoring tools) doesn’t typically have as much insight into what’s happening with storage (but that’s changing fast).

Nonetheless, there are a number of steps you can take to improve the performance of your virtual server storage. Here are 10 tips that can help you improve your storage systems’ performance for your VMs.

KNOW YOUR IOPS The science of tuning virtual server storage is, in its simplest form, “IOPS in versus IOPS out.” The drives in a LUN can provide a cer-

tain number of I/Os per second, the path in between the server and storage has a specific throughput, and the ap-plications demand so much. While the simplest ques-tion is “Do you have enough or do you need more?,” the answer isn’t always easy. Many of the tools, technologies and solutions described in the following tips can help you gain more I/O capacity or find ways to reduce the I/O de-mand (usually by knowing the apps and working with app owners or developers).

In a virtual infrastructure, the best way to understand the typical I/O for VMs and datastores is to use virtual-ization-specific performance analysis tools. Almost ev-ery one of these tools will help you to “know your IOPS.”

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COVER STORY  |  STORAGE FOR VMs

different LUNs or changing the RAID type for a LUN, you may improve performance for the virtual infrastructure as well as physical servers. In many cases, admins tend to look to new “bells and whistles” to improve performance when the source of virtual infrastructure storage perfor-mance issues are the same things that typically affect tra-ditional physical servers.

VAAI OR ODXVMware’s vStorage APIs for Array Integra-tion (VAAI) allows the vSphere hypervisor to offload some storage-related tasks to the stor-

age. For example, instead of cloning a VM through the hypervisor, that can just be done in the storage. VAAI also significantly reduces the time the disk is locked by using hardware-accelerated locking. Make sure your storage is VAAI-capable to ensure that your virtual infrastructure benefits from storage offload.

In the Microsoft Hyper-V world, Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) is comparable to VAAI. If you’re using Hyper-V, you want your storage to be ODX-capable.

To find out if your storage offers VMware VAAI, look up your SAN or NAS in the VMware Compatibility Guide. To find out if your storage is ODX compatible, ask the vendor if their product is Microsoft ODX certified. Over time, more and more vendors will add VAAI and ODX compatibility to their enterprise storage arrays.

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storage tuning efforts. By understanding the applications, and working with app owners and app developers, you may even be able to reduce the I/O workload and save the company a small fortune by not having to buy a new stor-age array or add high-performance drives.

If the application is already virtualized, you can use the tools mentioned above to get to know the typical I/O load over time and whether it’s read- or write-intensive. If the app isn’t virtualized, you may want to create a proof of concept for virtualizing the app, test the virtualized app with a realistic load and then model the production workload based on those tests. Alternatively, if the pro-duction app already uses a SAN, then you could use your SAN vendor’s performance tool to measure I/O workload for the physical server before virtualizing.

MAXIMIZE THE STORAGE YOU HAVE One way to improve storage performance is to ensure that you’re making the most of the stor-age you already have. You may have features

that aren’t even turned on, or perhaps you have features that could be enabled for a minimal cost. You could even consider reconfiguring your storage LUNs or RAID groups to gain better performance for the virtual infrastructure. I/O workloads change over time and perhaps the LUN lay-out and RAID groups that were laid out a couple of years ago no longer apply. By rebalancing the workload across

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COVER STORY  |  STORAGE FOR VMs

want to use thick provisioning (lazyzerothick, to be spe-cific) for VM disks and then use thin provisioning in your storage array.

VIRTUALIZATION-AWARE STORAGE Some new storage arrays are billed as “vir-tualization-aware.” That means the storage talks to VMware vCenter, and so the storage

knows what VMs are running and the path to their virtual machine disk files (VMDKs) on the SAN/NAS. Both the virtualization admin and the storage admin benefit signif-icantly from this communication. For example, you could find out what VMs are creating the most IOPS or which VMs are experiencing the most storage latency. Some vir-tualization-aware storage systems can even provide per-VM snapshots and clones. You don’t necessarily have to replace your storage array with one that’s virtualization-aware, but it’s something to consider for future projects and something to ask your current storage vendor about to see what similar features they’re planning for future release.

PARTITION ALIGNMENTWhen older operating systems (OSes) are run in VMs without taking partition alignment into account, you can cause performance

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LIMIT SNAPSHOTSOne of the most useful features of virtualiza-tion is the ability to snapshot a virtual ma-chine. That point-in-time picture of the VM’s

memory and virtual disk are useful should an application or OS upgrade go wrong or you need to test configura-tion changes. The snapshot is also used by virtualization backup and replication applications to capture virtual disk changes without causing downtime. However, too many times snapshots are overused, not only taking up disk space but causing poor performance for backup ap-plications, VMotion and other storage-related functions. Snapshots should only be used temporarily and then deleted.

THICK PROVISIONING VERSUS THIN PROVISIONING The ability to create VMs with thin provi-sioned virtual disks is very useful. I use thin

provisioning all the time in my lab environment. How-ever, thin provisioning in the virtualization layer and physical storage array must be carefully planned and managed. Most of the problems with thin provisioning relate to simply running out of storage. However, if you don’t have VAAI-enabled arrays, there can be some per-formance degradation when the thinly provisioned virtual disk needs to be increased in size. In that case, you may

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COVER STORY  |  STORAGE FOR VMs

downtime) from one datastore to another (or even from one array to another) should that datastore be experienc-ing high latency or high disk space utilization. Make sure your storage can speak to vCenter using the VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) so vCenter can identify the capabilities of the storage for SDRS to be as successful as possible in preventing storage hiccups.

AND IF ALL ELSE FAILS ...While budgets are tight for everyone, you may need to spend some money and purchase a new storage system to get higher performance for the virtual infrastructure. The virtual infrastructure’s I/O workload of 50-plus VMs all hammering on disk LUNs will be very different from the previous 1:1 mapping for a server and a disk LUN. In addition to the better performance your new storage will provide, you may gain additional features such as virtu-alization-aware storage, hybrid storage, VAAI, VASA and more.

Virtualization is a new mindset in the data center; when VMs are consolidated, storage must be rethought and re-equipped. n

DAVID DAVIS is the author of the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V video training library from www.TrainSignal.com. He has written extensively, is a vExpert, VCP, VCAP-DCA and CCIE #9369 with more than 18 years of enterprise IT experience.

issues. However, with Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 (or later, such as Windows 8 and Win-dows 2012), this is no longer an issue. Some virtualiza-tion-aware storage can automatically align VMDKs, no matter the OS. But if your company is using older OSes, you should verify that your VMDKs are aligned with your virtual machine file system (VMFS) and SAN LUN.

There are a number of tools available to help you ver-ify partition alignment of pre-Windows Vista and pre-Windows 2008 OSes, including the free UberAlign or the commercial vOptimizer Pro.

STORAGE I/O CONTROL With multiple virtualization hosts sharing the same storage, something needs to ensure the storage isn’t monopolized by an I/O-

hungry application or that more critical applications aren’t starved for I/O. VMware’s vSphere Storage I/O Control does this and is enabled with a single checkbox on a VMFS datastore.

STORAGE DISTRIBUTED RESOURCE SCHEDULER (SDRS)What VMware’s Distributed Resource Sched-uler does for CPU and RAM, SDRS does for

storage. SDRS will move virtual machine disks (with no

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Memorizing RAID level definitions and knowing which level does what can be:

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BACKUP

BACKUP APPLIANCES WERE originally designed for small companies or departmental backup environments. They provided an all-in-one backup solution that was easy to install and run, but they didn’t offer the features, func-tionality or scalability required for midsize or larger en-vironments. But with improvements to both hardware and software, data backup appliances have become viable solutions for companies of almost any size, even some in the enterprise space.

DATA BACKUP APPLIANCE DEFINEDFor our discussion, we’ll define a data backup appliance as a complete backup system that includes hardware to store backed up data and software that controls the pro-cess of copying data from client servers and computers to the storage system. Many of these products can write data to direct-attached storage (DAS) or networked storage

By Eric Slack

BACKUP IN A BOXBackup appliances combine software and hardware in a single box, configured and ready to go. Once considered just an SMB option, these products are now ready for the enterprise.

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STORAGE MANAGERS SEE BUDGETS RISE

THE OBJECT IS STORAGE

THE STATE OF SOLID-STATE AFTER FLASH

WIDE USE OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE

IN SMALL DOSES

BACKUP

scalability, both in capacity and performance, and they of-ten lacked the more sophisticated features that traditional backup applications include.

More recently, with improvements in storage and processing technologies (and the continuing decline in storage costs), data backup appliances have evolved into devices capable of replacing backup software and hard-ware in some very large environments. Technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning and compression have increased the effective capacity of disk arrays, fur-ther enhancing the appeal of these turnkey systems. And because processing power and network connectivity is so affordable these days, it’s possible to implement these features without significantly impacting the ingest and throughput speed of the appliance.

These developments have made backup appliances a better fit for IT departments in larger organizations, but there’s another factor to consider. The simplicity that makes appliances attractive to smaller companies is also appealing to larger IT organizations. After all, time saved on more basic tasks like backup administration can be re-directed to other, more complex projects.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF BACKUP APPLIANCESGenerally, an appliance is easier to implement than an independent software application because the appliance

(NAS or SAN), but we won’t consider that a requirement.That definition is in contrast to another familiar term,

purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA), which has been used to describe dedicated backup storage systems that are typically used as targets for backup software but don’t always include that software. Virtual backup appliances—backup applications that run in a virtual machine—also aren’t included in our definition, although many of the data backup appliance vendors offer that option as well.

Backup appliances were used as alternatives to tradi-tional backup infrastructures, which typically included a separate software app and storage devices, originally tape drives but more recently disk arrays. Backup appliances were primarily intended for smaller firms that didn’t have the IT resources to design, implement and operate tradi-tional backup systems, which could get rather complex.

Early backup appliances were better suited for small to midsize companies due to their somewhat limited

With improvements in storage and processing technologies, databackup appliances have evolved into devices capable of replacing backup software and hardware in some very large environments.

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problems when data sets grow; limited software features can mean a lack of platform or application support. Also, buying the entire system from a single vendor may mean you’ll have to pay more for capacity upgrades since you’re locked in to that supplier. When the appliance has finally reached full capacity, you’ll have to deal with a “forklift” upgrade to a larger unit or with managing two separate backup appliances.

REPLACE RATHER THAN REUSEAs turnkey solutions, most data backup appliances don’t allow you to incorporate existing assets, although some do support an existing backup software implementation. This could mean you end up buying hardware and soft-ware to replace similar assets you already have that may not be fully depreciated. So implementing a backup appli-ance may be a better solution if you’re looking to replace something that’s totally outgrown or you need to move up from a departmental or small business system.

APPLIANCE SAMPLERAll the backup appliances described here include dedupe, so it’s not singled out as a feature for any of the products, although some very real differences do exist between the ways these products handle data reduction. Cloud con-nectivity and cloud backup features are not specifically

comes with the backup software installed and config-ured on the server hardware—the right server hardware. There are no platform compatibility issues and the con-figurations available are optimized for the software. As turnkey solutions, appliances include at least the initial

storage hardware required to get up and running. Many allow users to add more disk capacity and tape, eliminat-ing another potential variable in the process. In addition to implementation benefits, appliances can save on acqui-sition costs compared to buying separate hardware and software components, and provide operational savings by consolidating hardware and software support.

The characteristics that make appliances easy to im-plement can also make them somewhat inflexible and less scalable. The manufacturer can only provide a finite number of hardware choices, compared with the range of server and storage hardware that backup software alone can support. Although scalability of these appliances has improved, limitations remain that may result in capacity

When the appliance has finally reached full capacity, you’ll haveto deal with a “forklift” upgradeto a larger unit or with managing two separate backup appliances.

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the existing data set. In business for more than a dozen years, the company’s backup appliances scale to hun-dreds of terabytes of disk capacity, with solid-state stor-age and tape options. Client support includes most Unix and Linux variants, as well as Windows and Mac OS. STORServer’s application and database support are com-prehensive and VMware integration is very thorough.

Symantec Corp. Symantec has been one of the primary backup software vendors for many years, going back to the days of Veritas and before that, OpenVision. The firm has now added appliances for its Backup Exec and Net-Backup products by installing its software on industry-standard server hardware, creating a standalone backup solution that can be integrated into an existing Symantec environment as a media server. The NetBackup appliance provides up to 72 TB of capacity and the Backup Exec ap-pliance provides up to 5.5 TB of usable capacity. As estab-lished backup software products, both support all major operating systems and applications, and offer a compre-hensive list of advanced features.

Unitrends. Unitrends originally designed its backup ap-pliances for small to midmarket companies with the in-tent of making backup simple and easy—in their words, a “toaster mentality.” The firm’s line of appliances tops out at nearly 100 TB of usable capacity and its backup/recov-ery software (developed in-house) has a complete list of

addressed for the same reason. Those two aspects of a data backup appliance are discussed in the “Data backup appliance selection criteria” section of this article.

EVault Inc. Before being acquired by Seagate Technol-ogy LLC in 2006, EVault started as a cloud backup ser-vice that provided consumer and small business backup services. A few years later, the firm added a local stor-age appliance to its offering, making them more than just a storage-as-a-service backup offering. Its current lineup provides usable capacity of up to 24 TB per appli-ance with support for all major platforms and many apps. EVault appliance features include bare-metal restore to dissimilar hardware, replication with bandwidth throt-tling, and concurrent backup and restore/replication.

STORServer Inc. STORServer took what might be called a hybrid approach to its product development, marrying an existing backup application, IBM’s Tivoli Storage Man-ager (TSM), with purpose-built hardware. While TSM is typically considered an “enterprise” backup application, STORServer has made its data backup appliances easy for even small companies to use.

TSM’s architecture uses a relational database that ab-stracts the logical data from the physical storage, allowing STORServer to scale much larger than other architec-tures. This also gives them the flexibility to evolve the hardware and software independently, without disrupting

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Data reduction technologies can play a big part in the calculation of how much “effective capacity” a system has, so the data types most likely to populate the backup appliance should be known. You can then compare them with the compression, deduplication and thin provision-ing technologies employed (see the section on data dedu-plication below).

n Cloud plus backup appliance. Most backup appliances provide some form of cloud integration, whether it’s the ability to send backups to the vendor’s cloud for DR pur-poses or to a public cloud provider such as Amazon or Rackspace. Since backups (and restores) involve so much data, care must be taken to understand how much data the backup appliance will actually send “over the wire” and how well it optimizes WAN bandwidth to the cloud. Efficiently handling specific data objects created by soft-ware applications, also called “application intelligence,” can greatly impact the cloud backup experience, so these details should be understood.

n Data deduplication. Deduplication has evolved from an obscure technology that helped launch the disk backup product category, to an almost checkbox feature included in most backup hardware and software. However, there are many variations of the technology that operate very differently and produce a wide range of data reduction ratios, but all are called “deduplication.”

features, including advanced functionality such as (near) continuous data protection, VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection vCenter integration, and support for “disk-to-disk-to-any” archiving for disaster recovery (DR) options and long-term retention.

Being in business for more than 20 years has enabled Unitrends to compile an extensive support matrix that in-cludes 100-plus different versions of more than 40 oper-ating systems in cloud, physical and virtual backup. This gives users a very comprehensive backup solution and al-lows them to migrate backup from old platforms easily.

DATA BACKUP APPLIANCE SELECTION CRITERIAWhen evaluating a data backup appliance, or just decid-ing whether to replace a traditional backup infrastructure with one of these offerings, there are several things to think about. Aside from price and feature set, the follow-ing characteristics should also be considered.

n Capacity and scalability. Whether it’s scale-up, scale-out or a combination, some appliances expand better than others. Obviously, projected growth and long-term stor-age requirements should be contemplated.

In some cases, tape support may be appropriate be-cause it provides the most capacity in the smallest foot-print and the lowest cost for long-term storage.

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new infrastructure and often reduces operational ex-pense. For many applications the cloud has offered an even simpler usage model and has replaced the use of hardware appliances.

However, backup touches most of the data in the en-vironment on a regular basis, and can send terabytes of data to the backup storage device every day. This makes on-site infrastructure practically the only way to maintain reasonable performance, both for backups and restores, and to keep bandwidth costs under control.

Backup appliances can now provide most of the func-tionality that even larger companies need from their data protection systems. And, until companies have all their data running on applications in the cloud, a local data backup appliance will still be an attractive alternative. n

ERIC SLACK is a senior analyst at Storage Switzerland.

The specific methods used for deduplication vary widely, such as:

P The length of data segments being comparedP Where in the ingest process comparisons take placeP How the hash value for each segment is calculatedP Where that hash table is stored

This makes it incumbent upon users evaluating a backup appliance to understand how its dedupe works, as well as how much data reduction it can produce on their specific data types in their specific backup environments.

THE BOTTOM LINEThe appliance format has become very popular for IT or-ganizations because it simplifies the implementation of

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By Rich Castagna

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

2013 SHAPING UP TO BE A “DECENT” YEAR FOR STORAGE SPENDINGManaging storage is always a struggle, but this year storage managers should have a little more money to spend on key technologies that can help ease the crunch of growing capacity and performance demands.

THERE’S A LOT going on with IT data storage these days. There’s the usual stuff that’ll keep a storage manager from a good night’s sleep, like finding a place to put more and more terabytes of data, providing snappy access to it and then making sure it’s protected. And against a rising tide of storage capacity woes, come new demands on perfor-mance as near-instant analytics take center stage.

And it really is a rising tide, as any data storage shop will attest. But the good news is that vendors are provid-ing new tools and improving older ones for storage man-agers who need to build out their IT data storage toolkits.

Each year we survey hundreds of storage pros who come up for air just long enough to tell us what technolo-gies they’re currently using or planning to add to their arsenals in 2013. On average, our respondents report that their companies oversee 1.5 petabytes of data on all forms of media, stored in-house and externally. That’s a lot of data to keep track of—here’s how they’re doing it.

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KEY STAT

$2.4The average storage budget, in millions,

reported on our survey.

DEEPER DIVEThirty-eight percent of companies report their

storage budgets will rise in 2013.

Budgets at larger companies—those with more than $1

billion in revenue—will grow by 3.4%.

Big companies also have a lot more to spend on storage:

$7.4 million.

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Storage budgets increase modestlyOne of our most closely watched indicators of the health of storage shops, and the data storage market in general, is how storage budgets fare when compared to the previous year. Back in the good old pre-recession days, it was common to see budgets rise by 3%, 4% or more, but more modest increases are appreciated as much these days.

Our respondents tell us their storage budgets will rise 1.5% over last year’s levels, the same increase we saw last fall. Not a huge increase—maybe just barely keeping pace with infla-tion—but an increase nonetheless. Coupled with declining prices, that modest increase will allow storage managers to toss a few more items into their shopping carts.

While the budget number itself might change, the way it’s likely to be spent won’t vary much from previous years. Storage hardware will take the biggest bite (36%), with mainte-nance (13%) and software (12%) also snapping up substantial shares.

YEAR-OVER-YEAR STORAGE BUDGET CHANGES HOLDING STEADY AFTER RECESSIONARY DIP

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

-1

-2

-3

Spring2007

Fall2007

Spring2008

Fall2008

Spring2009

Fall2009

Spring2010

Fall2010

Spring2011

Fall2011

Spring2012

Fall2012

Spring2013

3.7%

3.9%

2.9%

3.2%

-1.9%

0.4%

0%

0.6%

1.8% 1.9%

.8%

1.5% 1.5%

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WIDE USE OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE

IN SMALL DOSES

KEY STAT

63%Respondent firms that

currently have NAS systems installed.

DEEPER DIVEFive years ago, 27% of

the firms surveyed were using iSCSI

storage; today 48% do.

Plain old file servers still top file storage

purchase plans (26%); 21% plan to buy NAS.

Twenty-four percent (an all-time high) say

price is the most important buying criteria for storage

systems.

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Capacity growth requires new efficiency measuresOur respondents are engaged in an all-out battle with storage capacity. In addition to pet-abyte-scale numbers for total data stores, they maintain increasing amounts of “live” stor-age that may be needed at any time. The average installed disk capacity is 306 TB, and this year respondents say they expect to add approximately 43 TB of new disk storage, about the same amount that has been added each year for the four post-2009 years.

Of the companies shopping for storage systems, 47% will opt for midrange arrays; high-end gear is more of a niche purchase with only 13% planning purchases. About a third (32%) have their eyes on low-end storage systems that have steadily acquired higher end features.

A trend we first identified nearly six years ago appears to be continuing in 2013: more storage systems purchases will be for new drives (36%) to fill out existing systems than for new iSCSI SANs (14%), network-attached storage (NAS) systems (14%) or Fibre Channel (FC) SANs (13%).

To make better use of new and old capacity, storage shops will use a variety of efficiency technologies, including thin provisioning (41%), tiering (32%), primary storage dedupe (29%) and data compression (21%). Nearly as many companies are evaluating these technologies.

TOTAL DISK STORAGE CAPACITY (TB) CURRENTLY INSTALLED

350

300

250

200

150

100

50

0FALL 2009

SPRING 2010

FALL 2010

SPRING 2011

FALL 2011

SPRING 2012

FALL 2012

SPRING 2013

247 250 240263 269

247

312 306

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KEY STAT

9.1Terabytes of solid-

state storage currently installed on average.

DEEPER DIVECompanies planning

to add solid-state storage will purchase an average of 6.2 TB

in 2013.

Thirty-five percent of companies have more

than 10 TB of solid-state currently

installed.

Six percent of respondents will add more than 20 TB of solid-state storage

this year.

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Solid-state shaping up as storage game changerWhen we first asked about solid-state storage approximately three-and-a-half years ago, only 8% of those surveyed said their companies were using it. Today, 34% of companies have solid-state storage installed somewhere in their environments, with another 8% planning to add it this year and 31% evaluating.

Most of the deployments (69%) are solid-state mixed with hard disk drives in a hybrid ar-ray arrangement, but 45% have installed it directly into their servers (PCI Express or SAS/SATA form factors) and 21% use caching appliances built around solid-state. Forty percent of companies have treated some end users by installing the high-performance stuff in their desktops or laptops.

At the other end of the scale, in 2009 54% of companies said flat-out they didn’t have any plans for adding solid-state. In our latest poll, that number has been cut in half (27%). But the reasons for not taking the solid-state plunge haven’t changed much over the years: non-users cite the cost of solid-state storage (66%) and satisfaction with the performance of their hard disk systems (47%) as the main reasons for eschewing solid-state at this time—about the same numbers we saw three years ago.

MORE COMPANIES DEPLOYING SOLID-STATE STORAGE

34+31+27+8+p34%

Using SSD now8%Implementing SSD this year

27%No SSD plans

31%Evaluating SSD

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17 TBAverage amount

of data users have stored in cloud

storage services.

DEEPER DIVEThirty percent of

current users have more than 20 TB of data in the cloud.

Fifteen percent of respondents say their

companies use file sync-and-share services; 6% use

public services, and 9% have implemented

in-house sync and share.

Private storage clouds have been

implemented by 18% of respondents.

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Cloud storage offers a new tierAlthough still cautious, storage shops are increasingly looking to cloud storage services as an alternative or augmentation to in-house storage systems. While the number of users has dipped a bit over the last year, adoption of cloud storage is still moving forward: in 2010, only 14% of those surveyed were using some form of cloud storage; today, 22% are cloud users.

While backup is by far the most mature of the cloud storage services, our respondents are using the cloud for other types of storage as well, with disaster recovery (DR) leading the way. DR in the cloud could end up the “killer app” for cloud storage (along with traditional backup, of course). When combined with the ability to spin up virtual servers using a cloud computing service, cloud DR can offer extremely inexpensive, almost immediate recovery from crippling circumstances.

Current cloud storage users appear to be pretty satisfied with their experiences so far: 94% plan to expand their use of cloud storage services. Non-users are also getting on the band-wagon, with only 40% ruling out adding cloud storage to their environments this year.

HOW CLOUD STORAGE IS USED TODAY

12%

10%

8%

6%

4%

2%

0Remote

office online data

Archiving Data center near-line

data

Data center primary

data

Disaster recovery

3.3% 3.6%

8% 8.3%

11.6%

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KEY STAT

13%Respondents that say

they’ll increase the role of tape in their

backup systems—the all-time lowest number we’ve

recorded.

DEEPER DIVETape libraries are

shrinking; the average library will have an average of 84 slots versus 130 slots six

years ago.

Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed will

spin off some or all of their backup data to

tape (versus 79% three years ago).

Backing up to a NAS target is the most

popular disk-to-disk method (44%).

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Backup evolving, but still a tough jobFor most companies, changing their backup operations is no easy feat, which is why so many firms will wait patiently for their incumbent backup vendors to come up with new technologies to avoid “forklift upgrades.”

Although using disk systems for backup has been in vogue for long enough that it might even seem passé (especially considering cloud options), companies are still investing in their disk backup infrastructures. With 38% planning to increase spending and another 38% likely to spend as much as last year, there should be plenty of activity in the backup market.

Data deduplication for backup is still a hot technology even though it seems to have been around for ages. More than a third of companies plan to up their dedupe spending, which should add to the installed base of around 40% of all companies. And other mature tech-nologies, like continuous data protection (CDP), are still under consideration by many com-panies. With its potential to bring radical change to traditional backup operations, CDP is starting to get some serious attention: 22% cite plans to increase CDP spending in 2013.

No discussion of backup would be complete without mentioning tape. Sadly, tape’s role continues to dwindle, with 40% saying they’ll reduce the role tape plays in backup operations—the highest number we’ve ever seen.

SPENDING PLANS FOR DISK-BASED BACKUP

0 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

General disk backup

Data deduplication

Continuous data protection

38%

34%

22%

38%

33%

29%

6%

5%

6%

18%

28%

43%

n INCREASE n STAY THE SAME n DECREASE n NO PLANS

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KEY STAT

8 TBAverage amount of backup data users have stored in the

cloud.

DEEPER DIVEThirty-eight percent of

cloud backup users have more than 10 TB of data in the cloud.

Non-cloud backup users will get onboard

in 2013, with 9% signing up for email

backup.

Among those not yet using cloud backup,

22% say they’re evaluating the

services.

New data protection concerns: cloud and mobileBring your own device (BYOD) may morph into “bring your own disaster” if storage man-agers don’t take mobile device data protection more seriously. Sure, it’s a relatively new problem and retooling backup takes time, but according to our survey the vast majority of mobile devices are roaming the data wilderness unprotected.

The best-protected end-user computing devices are desktop PCs, and the term “best” is relative: 59% of respondents said desktop backup either isn’t done at all or is left up to the user. And it gets a lot worse—63% of laptops are similarly at risk. For smartphones and tablets, the new darlings of the mobile set, there’s scant protection: 14% of tablets and 11% of smartphones are protected using traditional backup apps, specialty apps or the cloud.

The cloud has become a convenient target for backups as most apps and some hardware devices can ship backup data straight to a cloud service. Twenty-eight percent of re-spondents are using the cloud for some or all of their backups, somewhat lower than the 30%-plus marks we saw last year. Email is still the most popular app for cloud backup, no surprise considering how easily email services can be outsourced. Cloud backup is poised for growth: 39% will increase spending in 2013 while 57% will continue to spend at 2012 levels.

HOW DO YOU PROTECT THE DATA ON THESE ENDPOINT DEVICES?

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0Desktop PCs Laptop PCs Tablets Smartphones

14%16%

17% 20%

45% 47%

69% 69%

n NO BACKUP FOR THESE DEVICES

n LEAVE IT TO END USERS

n CLOUD BACKUP

n SPECIAL BACKUP APP

n MAIN BACKUP APP

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KEY STAT

41%Respondents who

replied “no problem” when it comes to

backing up virtual servers.

DEEPER DIVEManagement app

shopping: 43% say they’ll look for tools

to better manage storage for VMs.

Solid-state to the rescue: 35% are using solid-state storage to pump up their virtual desktop installations.

The biggest problem with backing up VMs

is backing up too much data (13%).

Users and their storage adjusting to virtual serversVirtual server environments have created problems for storage shops from Day 1, ranging from performance bottlenecks to backup woes. Things have settled down significantly in the last few years with both hypervisors and storage systems getting some adjustments.

The most widely used storage for virtual servers is still Fibre Channel SAN, but its once im-posing lead has dwindled to a mere 2 points over iSCSI block storage. Cheaper and easier to implement in virtual environments, iSCSI offers an alternative that at least seems simpler than the more sophisticated Fibre Channel systems. A couple of years ago, a third of re-spondents said virtual servers made storage management more difficult; now, only 24% feel that pain, although 65% still say server virtualization consumes more storage.

Backup for virtual machines (VMs) is also a lot easier now. Three or four years ago, nearly a quarter of respondents were still using the fairly awkward VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to back up VMs. VCB has been surpassed by specialty backup apps designed specifi-cally for VMs: 16% say they’re using those apps compared to only 6% three years ago.

MAIN TYPE OF STORAGE USED FOR VIRTUAL SERVERS

40%

30%

20%

10%

0Fibre

Channel SANiSCSI SAN

NAS Direct- attached storage

Haven’t virtualized our servers

32%30%

14%12% 12%

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ABOUT THE SURVEY: This is the eleventh year we’ve fielded the Storage

magazine/SearchStorage.com Purchasing Intentions survey. Storage magazine subscribers and Search- Storage.com members

are invited to participate in the survey, which gathers

information related to storage managers’ purchas-

ing plans for a variety of storage product categories.

This edition had 710 qualified respondents across a broad spectrum of industries, with the average company size

measured as having revenue of $1.2 billion.

STORAGE PURCHASING INTENTIONS

Hot techs on storage managers’ radarFor the last five years, no single technology has been able to hold the top spot in our survey as storage shops test and implement a range of storage technologies. This year data dedu-plication came out on top followed by 10 Gbps Ethernet, which had high marks for actual/planned implementations. Solid-state storage is also near the top, its ranking boosted by the amount of evaluation activity. The most puzzling entry may be encryption; it always finishes near the top while nearly 50% of companies have yet to seriously implement it. n

TOP-OF-MIND TECHS FOR STORAGE SHOPS

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

Data deduplication for backup

10 Gbps Ethernet products

Solid-state storage

Data encryption

Primary storage data reduction

Remote replication

DR monitoring/testing apps

Continuous data protection

Multiprotocol storage arrays

Change management software 28%

31%

23%

24%

30%

30%

31%

31%

44%

37%

23%

20%

30%

30%

26%

31%

30%

33%

22%

30%

n ALREADY IMPLEMENTED/WILL IMPLEMENT n EVALUATING

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Object storage: What’s all the fuss about?After all the attention object storage has received this year, it seems like there should be plenty of use cases for it. But it might be that object storage is the answer to a problem not yet discovered.

HOT SPOTS  |  TERRI McCLURE

A T HEWLETT-PACKARD (HP) Co.’s an-nual analyst meeting this year, David Scott, senior vice president and gen-eral manager of HP’s storage busi-ness, made the bold claim that NAS

will disappear and object-based storage technology is the future of unstructured data. Scott isn’t alone in his enthu-siasm for object technology. Barely a week goes by with-out another major storage vendor (and a few minor ones) staking their claim on the object storage market. At last count, there are nearly 20 vendors in the object storage market, including all the major storage vendors. There aren’t nearly as many object stores on the market as there are DAS, SAN and NAS, but there is a groundswell of sup-port that is gaining momentum.

But that momentum seems more of a vendor push

rather than a customer pull. Many smaller vendors offer-ing object storage are struggling for customer adoption and acceptance; users just don’t know why they need to introduce yet another storage platform (non-standards-based) into their environment. It may just be that ob-ject stores are still a bit ahead of their time and IT isn’t in enough pain yet to compel the technology change. As one vendor recently told me, “it solves a problem that’s still around the corner.” How fast that problem is approaching often depends on the industry and use case.

OBJECT STORAGE DEFINEDObject storage operates differently from standard file sys-tem storage. With a standard storage infrastructure, con-tent is managed through a hierarchical file system using

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HOT SPOTS  |  TERRI McCLURE

integrated with applications via a proprietary API, and EMC built a strong ISV partner ecosystem and sales chan-nel to drive adoption.

Centera was not a high-performance system, and it didn’t need to be. Many of the next-generation object stores now on the market are still targeted at “semi-active data” use cases like active archive or Web content depots, with performance attributes that match the need. The scalability and manageability of object stores make them a natural back end for cloud deployments.

Some object stores are designed for higher perfor-mance primary storage use cases, applications that re-quire high throughput such as those found in media and entertainment, research and development, and analyt-ics. Object stores are architecturally a good match for these use cases because of the scale-out nature of these systems that provides a basis for greater bandwidth and overall throughput. But these offerings have somewhat of an uphill battle—they face the adoption challenges ob-ject stores have seen in general and they need to over-come the perception that object stores are mainly archive solutions. However, Quantum has certainly seen trac-tion with StorNext in media and entertainment, and both DataDirect Networks and Scality (and to some degree Cleversafe with its Hadoop integration) have seen some uptake.

The general adoption challenge, regardless of use case, is that these object stores require integration with

an index table that points to the physical storage loca-tion of each file and tracks only simple metadata. This ap-proach limits the number of files that can be managed in a single directory. Object storage data is organized into containers of flexible sizes (“objects”). Each object has a unique ID (instead of a file name) with metadata that can include detailed attributes. This metadata can be used to set up automatic storage policies such as the migration of aging data from high-performance to more cost-efficient capacity-based disk or the deletion of data when it ex-pires. Object storage offers a simpler design and greater scalability, easily managing billions of individual objects. Historically, the disadvantage of object storage has been performance, as data retrieval is generally considered slower than with a file system. However, recent market entries from vendors like DataDirect Networks and Scal-ity are challenging that notion.

Object storage has been around for many years. One of the earliest (and perhaps best known) object stor-age systems was EMC’s Centera, which came out in the early 2000s. Centera was called content-addressable stor-age (CAS) because it derived an object ID directly from the content itself, generating a digital fingerprint of the data. It was targeted at long-term “active archive” stor-age—data that needed to be retained, grew like kudzu, was occasionally required for something and needed to be retrieved in a timely manner (records for e-discovery or medical images for patient care, for example). Centera

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HOT SPOTS  |  TERRI McCLURE

But over time, as interfaces standardize and applications are developed with object storage back ends in mind, ex-pect object stores to show measurable gains as a platform of choice even in the enterprise.

Over time, object stores will likely coexist with NFS and CIFS as just another way to store and manage un-structured data. Adoption will be use-case dependent. When data growth, manageability, cost and/or through-put trump random throughput and advanced features such as point-in-time copy and synchronous remote rep-lication (as in the case for long-term archive or data-in-tensive high growth apps), object will likely rule the day. That’s not to say object stores will never have advanced feature sets, but they’re playing catch-up in that area and enterprise storage vendors aren’t standing still. And for specialty use cases, some of the integrations with Hadoop that take advantage of the parallel, scale-out object store architecture look extremely promising as a way to store and process massive amounts of data affordably. Ulti-mately, it will come down to cost and manageability. n

TERRI McCLURE is a senior storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, Mass.

proprietary APIs; they don’t “talk” to applications in stan-dard interfaces such as NFS, CIFS/SMB or SCSI. That lack of a standards-based interface has been somewhat of an adoption inhibitor primarily because users don’t want to write new application interfaces. But perhaps a big-ger inhibitor is the lock-in this creates to a single ven-dor’s storage architecture. This has been an issue for the past couple of years, but is likely to be a non-issue soon as most object storage vendors have added NFS and CIFS support (or will soon). Additionally, many have added support for Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service APIs, which are quickly becoming the de facto RESTful interface standard. These advancements should finally re-move big issues with adoption and stimulate business.

NETTING IT OUTObject store adoption is still largely confined to service providers or large enterprises that have the money and resources to deal with integration. In enterprise IT, NFS and CIFS will still be around. (Nothing ever dies in IT. HP even builds a couple of minicomputers every year for legacy applications that can’t be ported to other systems.)

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Post-flash solid-state storageNAND flash-based storage is becoming a common alternative, but NAND flash could soon be replaced by newer forms of non-volatile memory like MRAM.

READ/WRITE  |  MIKE MATCHETT

F LASH STORAGE IS everywhere these days. It’s hard to have a discussion about IT in-frastructure without someone talking about how flash storage can be leveraged to make server and storage architectures

faster. It’s not necessarily cheaper, although a large in-crease in workload hosting density can provide cost justi-fication. But it will certainly deliver higher performance at key points in the I/O stack in terms of outright latency; and with clever approaches to auto-tiering, write jour-naling and caching, higher throughputs are within easy reach.

But flash as a non-volatile random-access memory (nvRAM) technology has its problems. For one, it wears out. The most common type of flash is based on NAND transistors like static RAM (SRAM), but has an internal

“insulation” layer that can hold an electric charge without external power. This is what makes it non-volatile; but writing to NAND flash requires a relatively large “charge pump” of voltage, which makes it slower than RAM and eventually wears it out. Perversely, wear-leveling algo-rithms designed to spread the damage evenly tend to in-crease overall write amplification, which in turn causes more total wear. And looking forward, because of the physics involved, flash is inherently constrained as to how much it can eventually shrink and how dense it can get.

A FLASHIER SOLID-STATEFlash is constrained in terms of density, power and per-formance compared to active DRAM. This currently isn’t a problem, but as we continue to discover ways to

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READ/WRITE  |  MIKE MATCHETT

magnet layer first to give all the electrons an aligned spin. As those polarized electrons run into and pass through the magnetic bit layer, they torque its magnetic field to effectively flip it. As there’s no external magnetic field, spin-torque MRAM (ST-MRAM) circuitry could eventu-ally be shrunk to DRAM-like densities.

There are other non-volatile RAM technologies in de-velopment and production, including ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) that uses a ferromagnetic “liquid” layer and pa-rameter RAM (PRAM), which uses physical material phase changes induced by rapid heating and cooling to store bits. It’s too early to bet the farm on any one tech-nology, but the current consensus is that MRAM has the brightest future in terms of offering the best power, den-sity, materials and overall cost potential.

MRAM IS ALREADY IN USEToggle MRAM is already in wider use than you might suspect. For example, Dell EqualLogic and LSI both use MRAM technology in their storage RAID controllers. The market for ST-MRAM is just getting organized. Everspin Technologies recently announced a 64 Mb DDR3 form factor ST-MRAM chip; Crocus Technology is developing a thermal-assisted technology applied with spin-torque; Spin Technologies has an orthogonal MRAM approach promising high densities; and Micron Technology, Qual-comm and Toshiba have all invested in MRAM.

creatively leverage flash to accelerate I/O, flash will ul-timately give way to newer types of non-volatile mem-ory that aren’t as limited. Perhaps the most promising technology today is a type of nvRAM based on magne-toresistance. Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) stores information as a magnetic orientation rather than as an electrical charge. This immediately pro-vides a much higher read and write performance that is closer to DRAM speeds than flash because bits are read by testing with voltage, not current, and written with a small current boost, not a huge charge. (Current DRAM latency is less than 10 nanoseconds [nsec]; MRAM is currently around 50nsec, and flash is much slower at 20 microsec-onds to 200 microseconds depending on read or write.) Because there’s no charge pump, MRAM doesn’t wear out like flash does.

VARIETIES OF MRAM TECHNOLOGYThere are two main generations of MRAM technology available. The first is “toggle” MRAM in which writing relies on creating a localized magnetic field with crossed wires. One can immediately imagine that toggle MRAM is limited in density by the constraints of preventing the write magnetic field from affecting neighboring bits.

A new generation of MRAM technology is based on the principle of spin-torque transfer, which flips a mag-netic bit by passing a write current through a permanent

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READ/WRITE  |  MIKE MATCHETT

limited to flash-specific solutions. When nvRAM be-comes as fast as DRAM, and in the case of MRAM can also be built into the same silicon as compute, whole new ways of architecting both servers and storage will emerge. Imagine persistent storage that is potentially as fast as active compute memory. Ultimately, a few years out, we can foresee a total chip-level convergence of stor-age and compute. If data persistence can be built di-rectly into compute nodes, we’ll see some terrific gains in green computing and an explosion in more fabric-like distributed computing. Today’s big data and virtualization cluster offerings may provide some clues to the possible future data center, with compute mapped out locally to storage on pluggable, virtualized scale-out infrastructure.

If you’re just now thinking about how to reengineer or re-architect to take advantage of flash, it would be worth some effort to look out a couple of years and think about what solid-state storage might look like after flash. n

MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

The current industry investment in flash is huge, and demand for flash is still white hot. With such market mo-mentum, vendor production will remain focused on flash for the next couple of years. But new types of non-volatile RAM will inevitably take over. Hopefully, the architec-tures and approaches we see being developed and pro-duced today to leverage flash can evolve to accommodate even faster, lower power nvRAM generations. Unfortu-nately, in some cases we see vendors acting as if NAND flash is the end-all be-all, and we think that’s a recipe for obsolescence.

MORE IN STORE FOR MRAMMRAM has the potential to come to market in the next couple of years in a density, cost and form factor that could obsolete flash solutions overnight. Current flash memory ecosystem players should stay on top of this emerging technology so they’re ready with a new genera-tion of offerings as MRAM evolves.

Perhaps the most significant challenge won’t be

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19+30+33+18+p

SNAPSHOT

Solid-state storage widely used, but still in small dosesJust about every storage vendor sells solid-state storage devices, with a fair number of them pushing a variety of implementations. And it appears that us-ers are listening and buying, as our latest survey shows 55% of companies are using solid-state storage versus 36% a few years ago. The most popular deploy-ment is in hybrid arrays that mix flash with hard disks (53%); 40% use solid-state as direct-attached storage in their servers. On average, companies have been using solid-state storage devices for 15 months, and have an average of 5 TB in-stalled (with plans to buy another 5.2 TB). Flash still isn’t cheap, so most respon-dents (61%) just use it for their critical apps. Thirty-two percent of solid-state drive users have tapped into the burgeoning market for solid-state software that promises to improve caching or tiering. Users like their flash; on a 1-to-5 scale, where 1 is extremely satisfied, the average score was 1.7. —Rich Castagna

FOR WHAT TYPES OF APPLICATIONS DOES YOUR COMPANY USE SOLID-STATE STORAGE?*

5AVERAGE NUMBER

OF TBs OF SOLID-STATE

STORAGE CURRENTLY INSTALLED

HOW LONG HAS YOUR COMPANY BEEN USING SOLID-STATE STORAGE?

18% More than

2 years

30% 6 months to a year

19% Less than 6 months

33% 1 year to 2 years

Mission-critical

business apps

End-user apps and

files

Hosting virtual servers

Hosting virtual

desktops

Non- mission-

critical apps

Other

*MULTIPLE SELECTIONS PERMITTED

61%

42% 40%

25%

20%

7%

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TechTarget Storage Media Group

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