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 Finding Sense in Storage |
There's nothing quite like a good IDC research report to send shivers down your spine. Last month, EMC sponsored one such paper, "A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010," and its findings, while perhaps not surprising in retrospect, are still stunning. As a backdrop, consider that Chevron accumulates nearly 2 terabytes of data daily. The 200 traffic surveillance cameras around London pour 8 terabytes into their command center each day. All told, 2006 saw 161 exabytes (161 billion gigabytes) of digital information created—about three million times the amount of analog information found in all of the books ever written. This places us on track in 2007, for the first time, to create more information than we have the capacity to store.
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Whoa, buddy, that's too much information.
Until recently, storage capacity has managed to keep pace with the amount of digital data generated. Now, though, despite that storage capacity is doubling every 24 months, the information being generated is growing far faster. |
For resellers, this is an incredible opportunity. There is more demand for storage than the market can possibly satisfy. If you've ever found yourself deleting old files to make way for new ones—and if you own a DVR, then you probably deal with deletion on a weekly basis—then you're already aware of the problem on a personal level. Companies face the same issues, only their problem is deeper. Compliance regulations from local to national levels mandate that many businesses maintain old data and safeguard it from any tampering or harm. These organizations don't have the luxury of deleting unneeded files; they're required to develop new storage infrastructures for dealing with the ever-accumulating data load.
Of course, the more important a buyer's data is, the more important it is to provide that buyer with a long-term, scalable solution able to meet triple-digit storage growth within the next few years. (IDC predicts that the amount of data produced annually will grow from 2006's 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes in 2010.) That's a much taller order than you might suspect at first glance. For a company needing to store 1TB today, do you urge them into something like Maxtor's 1.5TB OneTouch III, Turbo Edition? If the company has a couple dozen or more employees all needing semi-frequent access to that drive, probably not. Foremost among the several problems with this approach, the traffic is likely to bog down the host machine at the other end of the USB connection.
How about a four-drive network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure, such as Intel's SS4000-E? Maybe. But now we have to look at how that storage is being used. NAS devices store and retrieve data at the file-level, meaning that an entire file is copied at once. If multiple users need a file at the same time, only one of them isn't going to be twiddling his thumbs at any given moment. Similarly, files such as Exchange and SQL databases shouldn't be handled at the file level because doing so might sacrifice realtime access by multiple users and impose a risk of losing data. This rules out most NAS approaches.
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An affordable entry point.
For groups that either don't need or can't afford more scalable storage solutions, Intel's SS4000-E, outfitted with multiple RAID options and four hot-swappable SATA bays, is a great way to protect and share a few terabytes. |
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The trouble with nearly all low-end NAS boxes is that you can't expand them. Once you fill up those bays with the biggest hard drives possible, you're done with that volume. Given 1TB drives, a 4TB NAS box might seem plenty big...for a workgroup. But consider a small company doing a new video effort along the lines of our own RAM TV. All the raw footage is shot in high-def. All of the drafts get saved, as do the various streams encoded with different resolutions and codecs. One video project can easily consume tens of gigabytes, and we're en route to having dozens of them. The press files for each magazine issue chew up hundreds of megabytes, never mind the ever-increasing library of image artwork we maintain for all issues past, present, and future. You get the idea. Four terabytes just isn't the bottomless pit it used to be.
In this case, a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) or RBOD (RAID Bunch of Disks; essentially a JBOD with RAID processing built in) enclosure enables up to several dozen drives in a single box, often in a format suitable for rackmounting. These enclosures can usually be cascaded through various networking means for even larger storage repositories. The JBOD/RBOD cables back to a server of some sort. Then we have the question of how much (and what kind) of storage should be in the server. Do you combine the server and JBOD into a single machine and then add more JBODs as needed? At this point, we're talking about medium-sized business and enterprise storage solutions, and that may be aiming higher than most of your customers can imagine today.
But some of your customers will need that class of scalable storage architecture, if not today then in the future. Doesn't it make sense to offer them an infrastructure that can start out modest and scale up over time without confining them to the limitations of typical low-cost storage products? Sure. The only problem is that the storage market is by and large a disjointed, sprawling mess. Just look at the hardware platform options mentioned above. We haven't even discussed software yet. If you haven't dealt much with storage servers, the names Open-E, FalconStor, Rackable's Terrascale, Wasabi, and their like are probably foreign. You'd be likely to look at that seemingly vertical learning curve and say, "Forget it. I'm just gonna buy a turnkey deal from HP." After all, those HP StorageWorks All-in-One systems come with most of the decisions already made and a three-year on-site service plan direct from HP.
If you don't want to learn the storage market in any depth, you bet—HP's AiO and other tier-one choices like it aren't a bad way to go. But read IDC's report. Is there any better growth market than storage in the channel right now? If you had a choice, why would you take the tier-one route and sacrifice all of that good margin, never mind more opportunities to get into service revenue streams? Ah, right. The learning curve.
Well, what if there were a couple of new products that could turn that educational equivalent of a K2 scaling into a gentle day hike? We think there are: Intel's new SSR212MC2 ("McKay Creek") and Microsoft's Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 (WUDSS).
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The way to get inside storage.
Intel's SSR212MC2 ("McKay Creek") storage server jams 12 SAS/SATA hard drives, up to a pair of quad-core Xeon processors, swappable and redundant 850W power supplies, up to 32GB of memory, and much more into a 2U rackmount chassis. |
Intel will tell you that McKay Creek represents the de facto form factor for tomorrow's SMB storage needs. In fact, this is the same 2U, 12-drive, Xeon-based form factor we saw with last year's SSR212CC ("Compass Creek") storage server. But to put the two systems on the same level would be misleading. True, both boxes accommodate up to twelve hot-swappable, 3.5" SATA drives and a range of add-in networking card options. However, McKay Creek is based on the Bensley platform. Whereas the older box used a single 2.8 GHz Low Voltage Intel Xeon processor (800 MHz FSB, 1MB L2), McKay Creek pole vaults up to a dual-processor architecture using the S5000PSLAS ("Star Lake") motherboard. This allows for either one or two 5100- or 5300-series Xeons, meaning you can have up to eight cores in one 2U storage server. The ability to build in two 2.5" drives or a DOM cartridge as boot sources almost seems like a stray detail.
This is a deal-changer, and it's what Intel means when it says that McKay Creek is tomorrow's storage form factor. 2U with 12 drives isn't new, but packing in this much horsepower behind them is. It's also worth pointing out that, as of this writing a mere two weeks before McKay Creek's arrival, Compass Creek still sells for upwards of $3,000. According to Intel, McKay Creek without the SRCSAS144E ("Boiler Bay") RAID card option will retail for about $2,815. With the card, the SKU goes for roughly $3,625 and, of course, supports connection to external SAS JBOD enclosures.
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Winning cards.
Intel's SRCSAS144E ("Boiler Bay") is the low-profile SAS RAID card (based on Intel's 500 MHz IOP333 chip and LSI's 1068 controller) bundled with McKay Creek. SAS expanders allow for up to 255 connected devices, and perks like Intel's RAID smart battery help preserve customer data even in the face of power failure. |
More importantly, with all of this CPU capability, McKay Creek isn't pigeonholed into being only a storage product. The box holds its own as a compact, powerful application server that happens to have 12 SAS/SATA hard drive bays, and it supports all of the latest in virtualization platforms. Based on how you configure and install it, McKay Creek can be direct-attached storage (DAS), NAS, or a storage-area network (SAN) appliance. And the fact is that the more a company's storage arrangement matures—whether that means more users, more data, higher-capacity or higher-bandwidth data, or anything in that vein—the more the company will benefit from having compute resources integrated with the storage resources. This aids in performance on several fronts, including increasing throughput and encoding/decoding of streams in media applications. The more work the storage system can do, the less burden is placed on supporting servers. And if the price delta between a robust server like McKay Creek and a conventional pedestal-plus-JBOD is nominal, why wouldn't you take all of McKay Creek's advantages?
Unlike many preceding storage servers, though, McKay Creek comes without any bundled software, and this brings us to WUDSS. Microsoft calls the operating system "Unified" because it supports both NAS-like file transfer as well as SAN-like block-level storage, which simply means you can transfer pieces of a file rather than the whole thing at once. The OS also supports Fibre Channel and iSCSI, the two primary technologies for networking high-performance storage devices and enclosures, and WUDSS includes Microsoft's Windows iSCSI Software Target. All functionality from WUDSS' predecessor, Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, is preserved, but Microsoft now adds a much more streamlined setup and configuration; a centralized, robust management interface; unification of SMB and NFS share and storage provisioning; support for remote administration; and much more.
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One OS to rule them all.
While Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 is easy and flexible enough to power a solitary NAS appliance, it's also robust enough to harness a diverse storage network and make it all manageable through one intuitive console. |
Perhaps the key benefit of WUDSS is that it solves the old problem of needing multiple software tools to tackle a storage deployment. WUDSS makes quick work out of establishing and maintaining everything from a simple SAN to iSCSI clusters. The hierarchical management interface will be old hat to anyone familiar with Windows configuration. Just spend a few minutes checking out Microsoft's video demonstration of a few basic WUDSS procedures to see how simple it really is. This should dispell and doubts about ordinary resellers being able to grasp high-end corporate storage solutions.
Naturally, WUDSS isn't a perfect fit for every client. Sometimes a Linux-based configuration will make more sense, or a client may not need Microsoft's wide-ranging feature set. This is why Intel is working with 15 other ISVs on McKay Creek validation. But if you don't have the time, patience, or hiking boots for more than one solution to get going in SMB storage, then WUDSS is your best bet.
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Play it safe.
According to IDC, roughly 40% of all digital information "will be subject to security applications" by 2010. Whether we're talking about monitoring and storage of video surveillance streams or the archiving of security log data, bulletproof storage is emerging as a very big deal in this market. Moreover, the chart shows how hardware is only one piece in the solution puzzle. |
We didn't come here do give you product announcements. The point is that the channel is in serious need of high-margin areas in which it can excel. Clearly, there are few categories showing better growth than storage, not only in archiving and backup contexts but also as part of complementary categories, such as security and multimedia production. No category except networking is more universal in its application or timely for resellers to add to their solution offerings. Put plainly, with thousands of options at your fingertips, you have to sell something. Very few competing products can offer the same dollar value, flexibility, performance, and future scalability as McKay Creek, and none are backed by Intel's renowned service.
Intel and Microsoft have done a substantial amount of work to make sure that McKay Creek and WUDSS are absolutely compatible and complementary, and the same attributes that make Intel's new server desirable also apply to Microsoft's latest storage OS. We heartily encourage you to develop a diverse storage product portfolio in order to broaden your market appeal, but if it makes sense to pick a couple of products on which to form your core expertise, you won't do better than Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 and Intel's McKay Creek storage server. |
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