Storage subsystems – include the kitchen sink

Your father’s simple RAID array is fast receding in the rear view mirror. Just as cars now offer upgrades such as AC or power windows as the norm, modern storage subsystem are doing the same, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink and setting a new standard of what to expect in terms of features. Sure, some vendors still insist on charging for options but I’ll predict that we are moving to a new place where certain features will become expected – like AC on a car. We are not there yet but I can see the light in the proverbial tunnel – its close and I don’t think it’s an oncoming train.

EMC’s announcement of the new CLARiiON CX4 line is a good example of a full featured array subsystem – EMC may even have included a sink under the covers somewhere. Not to sound like a shill, but evolving, or maybe more appropriately sprouting, from the CLARiiON CX3 line are new features such as:

· Flexible multiprotocol support for fibre channel and iSCSI (nice to have the choice in the same box)

· Enhancements to controller technology – multi core 64bit – for improved throughput and scaling (can never have too much horsepower)

· Efficiency features such as drive spin down and low power SATA (the jury is out as to whether tiering support will make it easy to take advantage of the power savings.)

· Improved replication support (but there’s a license to buy to make it work…)

· Virtual (aka, thin) provisioning ( argh! this “virtualization” thing is getting out of hand!)

And once again solid state disks - SSDs. These interesting devices are starting to show up more and more  and now squarely in the SMB space.

For EMC customers, selecting between the Symmetrix and CLARiiON line will be more difficult – likely coming down to scalability and pricing of hardware and support. In many ways EMC, and I suspect the other big boys in the storage business, are following the lead of folks like Compellent, Equalogic (now Dell) and Pillar Data to name a few. All these upstarts have found an eager customer set hungry for more than a run-of-the-mill RAID array. Advanced features such as thin provisioning, replication and simple configuration have become par for the course for these vendor’s (and others) offerings to the SMB market. Of course, they all mix and match features, some doing better than others, but in the end these are not simplistic RAID arrays. After all, who needs the most help: the well staffed, well trained large enterprise organizations or the shoe string, thinly staffed middle sized outfits struggling to meet their storage needs? What could be better then storage gear that takes the “rocket science” out of storage management? We are in a new era for business oriented storage products, with differentiation based on rich feature sets, pricing of those features, service and reliability separating the leaders from the laggards.

Gone are the days of a commodity, stripped down Yugo of a RAID storage subsystem. Look for and demand high function from storage subsystems – anybody can do the simple stuff – it’s the high valued, labor saving, simplification features that will really count in your organization.

Posted by Gene Ruth