August 29, 2011

Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

by Vanessa Alvarez for Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

August 29, 2011

unified Storage Architectures Enable Private cloud Environments

by Vanessa Alvarez with robert Whiteley and Eric chi

Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

ExEcut I V E S u M MA ry
The storage industry is undergoing a transition. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) execs know that storage is a core component of enabling private cloud environments. But to achieve cloud flexibility and economics, the storage architectures in place needed to change. With many acquisitions taking place, as well as new solutions on the market, I&O professionals must prepare their storage environments. This document will walk you through the drivers shaping the midrange storage market, the 10 criteria that I&O teams should focus on when selecting a solution, and a summary of the top 11 solutions in the space.

tAbl E O F cO n tE ntS
2 New Business Initiatives Force New Storage Solutions 4 A Mix Of 10 Criteria Shape The Midrange Storage Landscape Five Established criteria Drive Midrange Storage Decisions . . . . . . but Five Emerging criteria Are necessary to Support new, Dynamic Workloads 6 The Midrange Storage Landscape Consists Of Two Vendor Categories category 1: Systems Vendors that can Offer Server, Storage, And networking category 2: Storage Pure Plays Offer the best Overall Economics 10 Other Vendors To Consider
rEcOMMEnDAtIOnS

n Ot E S & rE S O u rcE S
Forrester interviewed 10 vendors: compellent, Dell, EMc, Hitachi, HP, IbM, netApp, Oracle, Pillar Data Systems, and xiotech.

Related Research Documents update Q2, 2011: Are converged Infrastructures Good For It? June 22, 2011
Q&A: How to Get Private cloud right May 25, 2011 the Data center network Evolution: Five reasons this Isnt your Dads network December 15, 2010

10 Focus Your Storage On Simplification, Convergence, And Automation 11 Supplemental Material

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Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

New BuSINeSS INITIATIVeS FORCe New STORAge SOLuTIONS Most organizations today have SAN deployments in their environments. However, in the past year or so, weve seen I&O teams start data center consolidation and look to deploy a private cloud (see Figure 1).1 The goal is to leverage their technology platforms as part of their competitive advantage. This has generated a number of different initiatives in IT environments, including: 1) converged infrastructures, which couple server, storage, and network together, and 2) re-evaluating the storage equipment, either because it has reached end of life or because IT organizations are suffering from capacity growth and task overload. Private cloud requires a level of automation and efficiency that traditional storage solutions havent delivered in the past. As a result, I&O teams face three primary challenges:

The business has no idea what its data is. Much of the data stored today hasnt been touched
in some time and is sitting idle. Its important to assess data and rationalize which data truly requires primary capacity.

I&O and broader IT silos still exist. Silos cant continue if your organizations initiatives

such as private cloud are going to succeed. Yet most storage purchasing decisions are made separately from other technology purchases, and the storage teams dont always communicate with enterprise architecture, application development, or even other I&O teams like server and networking.

The wrong solution can hinder a bigger initiative. Often, I&O teams dont communicate with
lines of business and therefore dont know what kind of solution is needed for the initiatives at hand.

These challenges and new business initiatives require much more than just hardware. They require a simplified and flexible way of deploying storage in order to maximize resource efficiencies. Although most environments are Fibre Channel today, recent Forrester survey data shows that organizations are actually moving forward with adopting various protocols. Traditionally this has required two different solutions, but I&O execs are now approaching unified architectures that simplify the way of deploying and managing storage (see Figure 2).

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Figure 1 Private cloud Deployments Are no longer Hype

Which of the following initiatives are likely to be your firms/organizations top hardware/IT infrastructure priorities over the next 12 months? (Percentage of respondents who answered critical priority or high priority) Consolidate IT infrastructure via server consolidation, data center consolidation, or server virtualization Maintain or implement broad use of server virtualization as the standard server deployment model Automate the management of virtualized servers to gain exibility and resiliency Build an internal private cloud operated by IT (not a service provider) Use cloud service o erings for storage-as-a-service or virtual-server-as-a-service at a service provider 29% 23% 18% 28% 60% 61% 80% 79% 80% 77%

2010 (N = 1,037) 2009* (N = 1,020)

Base: North American and European enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010 *Source: Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North American And Europe, Q3 2009
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Figure 2 Multiprotocol use Is Gaining Adoption

Which protocols do you use for networking virtual server hosts to the SAN? 76%

36% 23% 4% FC NFS iSCSI FCoE 4% DAS

Base: 91 vendor and user companies that currently use virtualization technology in the x86 server environments (multiple responses accecpted) Source: September 2010 Global Virtual Server Environments Online Survey
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Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

A MIx OF 10 CRITeRIA ShApe The MIDRANge STORAge LANDSCApe Although the market is evolving quickly, and the line between midrange and high-end storage continues to blur, we have established 10 criteria to categorize a solution as midrange (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 How Midrange Storage Solves Known Problems
Criteria Established criteria Thin provisioning Asynchronous and synchronous replication Multiprotocol support Primary deduplication Automated tiering Emerging criteria Storage virtualization Stretch clustering Multihypervisor support Business problem solved Helps avoid capacity being underutilized, therefore buying capacity when truly necessary Both allow for data to be replicated more e ciently depending on the requirements Allows for exibility and tiering; not tied to Fibre Channel environment Eliminates duplicates, saving capacity Tiering maximizes resources, allowing for high-end disks to be used for high performance. Accessing data regardless of physical location/structure, managing storage easier for di erent requirements Cluster nodes geographically dispersed across distance, providing redundancy Multihypervisor support allows for organizations to leverage di erent hypervisors for di erent workloads, depending on the business need. Allows for metadata to be applied for extracting more easily Tie between server/storage to determines the capacity needed for workloads; higher peformance on servers
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Object storage support VAAI integration

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Five established Criteria Drive Midrange Storage Decisions . . . There are a number of proven storage technologies that have been on the market for some time now. Although these features are not massively adopted just yet, they do offer the functionality needed for a successful private cloud deployment. I&O teams should prioritize these five capabilities:

Thin provisioning. Thin provisioning is designed to optimize storage capacity in a shared

storage environment. It allocates capacity on-demand as opposed to pre-allocating, therefore increasing use. Capacity is normally oversubscribed, but it is only dedicated when data is

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actually written on the application. Although thin provisioning has been on the market for some time, I&O teams have yet to widely adopt it.

Asynchronous and synchronous replication. Most environments require synchronous

replication. But I&O should select solutions that have both capabilities and can identify which data needs which type of replication to drive more performance efficiency.

Multiprotocol support. Most SAN environments sit on Fibre Channel; however, we see an Primary deduplication. This is a process that looks for any redundant data. If it finds a

increase in interest for other protocols such as NFS and iSCSI. Solutions with support for all protocols are much more flexible for efficiency purposes and allow for effective tiering.

duplicate, the storage system will point to the original copy and eliminate the redundant data, freeing up capacity. Although widely used in backup, its much more beneficial in a primary storage environment, as it will significantly reduce the amount of capacity used.

Automated tiering. Tiering is a key function to enabling a private cloud and has been a manual

and tedious procedure for a long time. Automated tiering places hot data on high-performing disk and warm data, which isnt accessed as much, on cheaper disk, balancing out the cost efficiencies.

. . . But Five emerging Criteria Are Necessary To Support New, Dynamic workloads Today, the server, network, and storage environments are becoming more integrated than ever.2 The impact of initiatives such as server virtualization and VDI fundamentally change the way storage and network resources are dynamically allocated. Most organizations suffer today because of lack of preparation in designing their server/desktop virtualization environments. As a result, storage growth has spiraled out of control, and performance for deployments on both the network and storage side have suffered. As these initiatives continue to roll out, the server, network, and storage environments must understand the impact on each other and work in sync to deliver the necessary resources for flexible and intensive workloads. The solution is not to continue adding more hardware but to begin to understand the different features and functionalities that can help to address some of these concerns. We recommend that I&O teams focus on five emerging capabilities:

Storage virtualization. Similarly to server virtualization, storage virtualization eliminates the

dependencies between data and where its stored. This allows for flexibility in how capacity is managed.

Stretch clustering. Stretch clustering is critical when one or more cluster nodes of a SAN are

geographically remote. Different from vMotion, this is a group of ESX/ESXi instances within vCenter where at least some of the hosts in the cluster live in separate locations. vMotion, on the other hand, is the live migration of a guest virtual machine from one host to another.

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Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Multihypervisor support. Despite VMwares dominance in hypervisors, storage admins must

plan for growth in alternatives. As the hypervisor and storage become more interdependent on each other, storage systems must be able to support all hypervisors for environments where there are more than one in production.

Object storage support. Objects allow for a more granular way of identifying data. They use VAAI integration. For VMware-based environments, vStorage APIs for Array Integration
(VAAI) is an API that allows VMware hypervisors to hand off storage functions to storage arrays, alleviating workload strain on the servers.

richer metadata to easily retract data when needed based on software capabilities with languages such as REST or Java.

The MIDRANge STORAge LANDSCApe CONSISTS OF TwO VeNDOR CATegORIeS The storage vendor landscape has evolved, mainly due to consolidation. I&O teams are focusing on data center consolidation in the short term and enabling a private cloud long term.3 This is driving vendors to offer a new set of capabilities as highlighted above. But it also led to the massive M&A action we saw in 2010, where billion-dollar deals were struck.4 Although this report focuses on midrange solutions, in reality, the lines are blurring between high-end and the midrange space. The level of performance and amount of capacity for midrange solutions have increased in recent years. They are spilling over into the higher end range in terms of functions and features. To navigate this market, I&O teams should focus on two basic categories of midrange storage vendors (see Figure 4).

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Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Figure 4 todays Midrange Storage Market Offers A Wide Variety Of Solutions

Asynchronous and synchronous replication Object storage support Multihypervisor Support

Multiprotocol support

Stretch clustering

Vendor Compellent* Dell/EqualLogic EMC Fujitsu HDS HP (3PAR) IBM NetApp Oracle Pillar Data Xiotech No focus

Relevant domain

Primary deduplication

Some focus

Substantial focus

Core focus

*Compellent was acquired by Dell on 02/22/2011 Pillar Data was acquired by Oracle on 06/29/2011
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Category 1: Systems Vendors That Can Offer Server, Storage, And Networking We examined six solutions from five vendors in this space. They are:

Compellent Storage Center 5.4. Compellent represents one of the core values of storage in

private cloud models. Automated tiering creates resource efficiencies that allow for a system to identify hot and cold data and place it on the most cost-efficient disks. Dells enhanced

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Storage virtualization

Automated tiering

Thin provisioning

VAAI integration

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Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

capabilities place it in the top with its competitors. But Dell still needs to round out Compellent with self-service functionality, orchestration, and more robust resource management functionality, to meet all I&O cloud needs. As most vendors look to do this, we expect Dell to evolve Compellents capabilities to meet these requirements.

Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS. The technology of the former EqualLogic has always been

competitive in this segment. Today, EQL Firmware 5.1 supports iSCSI and NFS protocols, which are relatively less expensive than Fibre Channel, reducing the cost of storage capacity. Its support of NFS is beneficial to the server virtualization environment, as NFS is a much more efficient protocol to leverage for this. Although it doesnt support Fibre Channel natively, it does support Fibre Channel-like functionality over DCB Ethernet, for organizations that are willing to go down this route. Since most organizations primarily leverage Fibre Channel for their entire environment, much consideration needs to be made in choosing a solution that natively supports Fibre Channel.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) AMS. Although better known in the high-end storage arena,

HDS offers a midrange solution, which offers the basic functionalities such as thin provisioning, snapshots, and cloning, but is often overshadowed by its competitors EMC and NetApp. It provides support for FC, iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS. However, HDS still falls short with automated tiering and management capabilities as they relate to virtualized environments.

HP 3PAR. HPs acquisition of 3PAR was strategic to its position as a vendor that could fulfill the
I/O requirements needed for virtualization and private cloud environments. Automated tiering, a core criteria for the efficiency of a private cloud, is 3PARs strength. iT has been a leader in this space, and HPs addition has made it a midrange solution that can enable I/O requirements for efficiency. HP will need to further integrate 3PAR into its overall portfolio and help customers into the transition from its traditional HP EVA solution to a more robust solution that will help customers in the private cloud journey.

IBM V7000. The midrange market has evolved to include a number of the larger vendors,

which have traditionally been in the high-end storage space. IBMs acquisition of V7000 delivers midrange capabilities and meets all the established criteria with the exception of primary deduplication. However, it lacks in the multiprotocol support area, a key requirement for enabling private cloud environments.

Oracle Sun Storage 6000. With its acquisition of Sun, Oracles 6000 became its midrange solution.
Today, the 6000 supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication. However, it doesnt provide any thin provisioning, primary deduplication, or multiprotocol support all criteria that should be a part of a midrange solution designed to enable simplification and efficiencies.

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Category 2: Storage pure plays Offer The Best Overall economics The storage pure play market is dwindling because of all the industry consolidation, but its still the sweet spot for I&O teams looking to meet aggressive storage needs with midrange solutions. The top players include:

EMC VNX. EMC has long been a follower to NetApp in the midrange market. However,

its recent release of VNX comes one step closer. It brings a great deal of the features and functionality that enable private clouds, including thin provisioning, primary deduplication, automated tiering, and VAAI integration. Although EMC considers VNX a unified solution, it in fact still runs separate operating systems DART and FLARE in one device. The Unisphere management console eases the complexity and does alleviate a great deal of the manual tasks, but the fact is that its still two different environments.

Fujitsu Eternus DX440. The company has maintained a storage solution within its portfolio

for some time but hasnt made much traction in the midrange space. The solution offers all the basic functionality considered in our criteria, with the exception of primary deduplication. We expect Fujitsu to ramp up on its storage solutions as it sets out to provide a cohesive server and storage solution.

NetApp FAS3270. NetApp provides the leading unified solution. It continues to expand its

portfolio and grow within the market. Multiprotocol support and ease of use remain the most valued capabilities by I&O and storage teams. However, primary deduplication continues to gain adoption and will do so increasingly, as its a key feature for efficiency within private clouds; NetApp leads in making this functionality work without significantly affecting performance. The acquisition and integration of Akorri was a good step to further extend NetApp capabilities, but more needs to be done in this area for building private clouds.

Pillar Data. A company partially owned by Oracle, Pillar Data has been a staple in the

midrange solution space. Its solution offers the required criteria, but the value of its solution lies in its automated tiering capabilities. Its tiering allows you to set policies around your data, instead of just basing the requirement on use alone. Being partially owned by Oracle challenged the company in the area of innovation, as it competed to some extent against Oracles own storage solutions.5

Xiotech ISE. The ISE storage solution represents a new architecture for enabling the efficiencies

of cloud. It offers a hybrid storage environment that allows for automated tiering from SATA to SSD, and its management capabilities help determine where data can reside most efficiently and effectively. Its self-healing capabilities also allow for drives to be repaired within a datapac without the need for taking everything out of service. However, Xiotech has suffered from management changes and the perils that come along with changing strategy. Xiotech will need to focus on delivering the capabilities needed for a private cloud environment and ensuring that it can integrate into other core areas to this environment, such as server and networking.

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OTheR VeNDORS TO CONSIDeR Forrester believes that the tie between server, storage, and network will continue to occur. There are a number of innovative start-up vendors that are pushing the envelope to change the way storage is built out and managed today, bringing together the server and storage worlds. They focus on areas that have changed the storage requirements and contribute intelligence to the virtualized or cloud environment. These include vendors such as Virsto, whose virtualization management software sits within the hypervisor, bringing a better understanding of the virtual server environment; Nutanix, which brings server and storage closer together; and SolidFire, which is offering SSD with Flash, driving down the cost of SSD, while still providing a high level of performance. They are all offering a new way of creating efficiencies within virtualized and cloud environments.

r E c O M M E n D At I O n S

FOCuS YOuR STORAge ON SIMpLIFICATION, CONVeRgeNCe, AND AuTOMATION

Its no longer acceptable to have multiple storage systems in place that require significant manual intervention. you will need to evaluate solutions that simplify your infrastructure, have an understanding of your server and network environments, and automate as many tasks as possible. these solutions will ultimately enable the resource efficiencies of a private cloud environment. to maximize their investment, I&O teams will need to:

Assess the current storage environment. review the type of data and its requirements
when determining what solution you need. these solutions may serve general purpose workloads, but may not for certain types of workloads.

Discuss the business requirements. understand your business growth initiatives, and
determine what kind of solution will enable those. before making purchasing decisions, sit down with your line-of-business, server, and network liaisons to determine a comprehensive approach.

Leverage efficiency tools that help reduce the amount of capacity required. Features
such as thin provisioning and storage resource management tools have been around for some time now and have been proven. begin using them on a regular basis and in an automated manner.

understand the role of virtualization in storage. there is a great deal of intelligence

that sits within a hypervisor from a virtualization perspective. Ensure that you understand what capabilities can be leveraged from there, and make the connection to your storage environment. this tie becomes much more critical as virtualization becomes widespread throughout your infrastructure. communicate with your virtualization and network teams to make sure youre in sync.

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SuppLeMeNTAL MATeRIAL Companies Interviewed For This Document Compellent Dell EMC Hitachi HP IBM NetApp Oracle Pillar Data Systems Xiotech

eNDNOTeS
1

Recent Forrester inquiries from enterprise infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals show that theres still significant confusion between infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private clouds and server virtualization environments. As a result, there are a lot of misperceptions about what it takes to get your private cloud investments right and drive adoption by your developers. The answers may surprise you; they may even be the opposite of what youre thinking. For more information, see the May 25, 2011, Q&A: How to Get Private Cloud Right report. IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure or support complex applications but theres no recipe, and many ingredients just dont combine well. Complicating the story are the traditional infrastructure silos around servers, networks, and storage that must work together in a new, truly integrated way. Vendors like Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM have had basic converged infrastructure (CI) offerings for several years but many I&O teams hesitated to deploy them, as they required higher levels of integration. For more information, see the May 17, 2011, Are Converged Infrastructures Good For IT? report. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are facing a difficult challenge in the data center: tossing out the rules of networking architecture. After years of just throwing bandwidth at the problem, todays I&O teams are finding they need to build fundamentally different networks that accommodate advances in server virtualization and storage networking and pave the path to cloud computing. Todays traditional three-tiered architectures are giving way to flatter, converged Ethernet fabrics. Why? A fabric-based approach provides the necessary flexibility, performance, and reliability to support new shared resources, software, and data models. The goal of data center convergence and virtualization is to remove redundancy in SAN networks and inefficiencies in the compute spectrum and offer them from an information grid, AKA the cloud. For more information, see the December 15, 2010, The Data Center Network Evolution: Five Reasons This Isnt Your Dads Network report. Acquisitions have long been a part of the storage vendor landscape. But 2010 and the first part of 2011 saw an explosion of huge deals from almost every storage vendor. There are few independent options left, so its time for infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals to re-evaluate their impressions of the

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megavendors and work to standardize on the broad offerings of a few selected options. These deals also move vendors into some new territories, so I&O executives should look at how application-centric storage solutions and bundled offerings with server, network, and applications might fit in their environment. For more information, see the June 16, 2011, Blockbuster Deals Reshape The Storage World report.
5

Note that Oracle acquired Pillar Data on June 29, 2011 after the research and writing of this report was completed. We have decided to keep the Pillar analysis separate from Oracle given that only the announcement of the intent to acquire was made by the publication time of this report.

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