It seems that the "Network Attached Storage" marketplace
is cooling off somewhat. Key players, EMC and
Network Appliance appear to be reducing their focus
potnetially opening doors for Sun Microsystems and the
Hitachi, BlueArc partnership to get a
stronger foothold. Both these vendors, although late to market with
offerings, are, with adaquate execution, certainly more than capable of
advancing their market share in the current climate.
The Hitachi/BlueArc partnership delivers good solid components based on
well respected vendor technologies, the Sun offering certainly provides
all the same capabilities based on well engineered
hardware and flexible backend. Both solutions, especially
in vendor incumbent accounts should be reasonably easy to get
implemented and, for the vendor, pretty hard to dislodge by the
competition. This obviously assumes a number of pre-dispositions, each
vendor can execute on thier product strategies and each can demonstrate
to its end-users that there is a future in their solutions. Both of
which, EMC and especially NetApps have been very successful at doing in
the past. This is something new for both Sun and HDS, traditionally,
neither vendor has played much in the Network Storage
space.
As we all know, the world is rapidly changing, in particular the
storage space when considered in conjunction with business demands and
external technology enhancements. Can either of these, near monolithic,
rather expensive NAS devices continue to dominate?
Flexibility and agilty are not the strengths of either of these
solutions and personally I beleive that these will become key drivers
to future network based storage strategies. Potentially, reducing the
huge feature rich functionality of today's devices in favour of simpler
management, simpler deployment and less "bolt-on" options, where these
additional functions are just simply part of the environment and are
only components of the larger "infrastructure".
Currently, network serving is really only made up of the two
components, the device that can share and the Operating that delivers
the services to understand how to access the share, configuration,
management and control of the information is still maintained by either
the OS or the device, the transport protocol and medium themselves have
little to do with the transaction except to pass the traffic. These
"transport" components should take more of an active role in securing,
defining and managing the access, delivery and desired supporting
services relating to the information. This approach will truely deliver
heterogenous access, global availaility and most importantly
information integrity to the enterprise.
EMC appears to be driving their IP Storage strategy
towards Centera, whilst NetApps seems to be focussing
more on FC and especially pure iSCSI
offerings. Both such strategies in themselves might not be such a bad
thing, but are the problem children of today being ignored for the
promise of greener pastures? With todays infrastructures, technologies
and Operating System capabilities, traditional NAS is
still in demand and continues to solve many issues facing the IT
community. On the other hand, iSCSI is a great technology
and solves a few problems of its own, but is still less flexible and
less suited to many applications. Increased bandwidth, accelerated
Storage-Over-IP infrastructures are not here yet and will take sometime
to gather steam.
Are these vendors suggesting that Network Storage is not integral to
their future success? I do hope not, Network Storage in it's current
form might not be the way of the future, but I do feel that IP based,
high capacity, long distance File Serving is a long way
off being dead. In this very dynamic area of storage, he who advances
NAS simply beyond File Serving or Share Consolidation
will be assured longevity in the IP Storage market. This
is not precluding current Fibre-Channel Storage Networking interaction
and is definately including future IP based advancements in
bandwidth and performance such as "network
acceleration" technologies, "infiniband architectures"
potentially and service delivery mechanisms more tightly coupled with
virtualised infrastructures.
Sun is in a very interesting position, they have the opportunity to
natively integrate Network Storage with File-System and
even Operating System functions bringing much needed and
elusive central and common management capabilities.
Hitachi on the other hand offer a very interesting
approach to storage virtualisation that could be enhanced
and embedded in to front-end storage processing such as through
File-Serving environments as well as within the back-end
storage controller environments.
Sedona Perspectives 
(0 vote)
