Managing Diverse Storage Devices - Emerging Solutions

Source: Newsfactor E-commerce Minute (www.ecommercetimes.com)
Date: 18/10/2002

Summary

Enterprises are using an increasingly diverse mix of data storage equipment to wring out the most cost and boost the efficiency of their storage installations.
This is one of the findings of a recent data storage survey carried out by Internet World magazine in conjunction with investment research firm Punk Ziegal & Co. and market research firm Perseus Development Corp.

Internet World sponsored the survey of 495 executive and line-of-business managers to learn how they plan to spend their money on the latest storage technology.

Striking Storage Trends

One of the key findings was that 82 percent of the organizations expect to increase their storage capacity over the next 18 months. But the survey also revealed a number of striking trends about the types of storage technology they are investing in, says Steve Berg, senior storage analyst with Punk Ziegal & Co.

Enterprises are increasingly installing network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) systems as more cost-effective ways to provide fast and reliable storage capacity at the departmental level, or to relieve congestion on the direct attached storage systems that have been the mainstay in data processing centers for decades.

As the name suggests, NAS devices are attached to a LAN rather than directly to a server, which relieves the processing burden from the server and in turn speeds up access to data files.

What's in a SAN

SANs are networks of various storage devices that can be connected to multiple servers or to a single large server, such as an IBM mainframe. A SAN can include NAS drives, tape drives, or high capacity disk drives that were once directly attached to mainframes.

The purpose of the SAN is to provide a centralized way to manage diverse storage devices and to transfer storage processing from the servers to the network.

The Enterprise Storage Survey showed that 48 percent of the respondents plan to buy NAS or SAN storage. About 78 percent said their organizations already had NAS and SAN systems installed. In contrast, 84 percent say they had direct attacked storage systems running in their organization, and only 5.2 percent say they were planning to buy additional direct attached equipment.

SANs' Early Stages

The survey indicates that in the near term, organizations are going to acquire new NAS equipment because it is less expensive to use a particularly important consideration during a period of weak economic growth, when budgets are tight, Berg says.

However, he says, SANs appear to be on track to become the preferred longer-term solution. "I ultimately expect and have already seen based on the survey results that [NAS] solutions will get blended into [SANs]," says Berg.

The survey also shows that most organizations are still in the early stages of implementing SANs. Managers are setting up SANs on the departmental level rather than the enterprise level, he says. Most organizations are "wading in cautiously and they are ... trying to gain experience and also troubleshoot a storage area network before they roll it out on a broad scale," says Berg.