Net App Scores 100% For Midrange Storage Market Solutions

August 29, 2011

Market Overview: Midrange
Storage, Q3 2011
by Vanessa Alvarez
for Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

August 29, 2011
Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011
unified Storage Architectures Enable Private cloud Environments
by Vanessa Alvarez
with robert Whiteley and Eric chi

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 n tS n Ot E S & rE S O u rcE S
2 New Business Initiatives Force New Storage Forrester interviewed 10 vendors: compellent,
Solutions Dell, EMc, Hitachi, HP, IbM, netApp, Oracle, Pillar
4 A Mix Of 10 Criteria Shape The Midrange Data Systems, and xiotech.
Storage Landscape
Five Established criteria Drive Midrange
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category 2: Storage Pure Plays Offer the best
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rEcOMMEnDAtIOnS
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11 Supplemental Material

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based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

2 Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011

New BuSINeSS INITIATIVeS FORCe New STORAge SOLuTIONS
Most organizations today have SAN deployments in their environments. However, in the past year or
so, we’ve 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 haven’t 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 hasn’t been touched
in some time and is sitting idle. It’s important to assess data and rationalize which data truly
requires primary capacity.

· I&O and broader IT silos still exist. Silos can’t continue if your organization’s 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 don’t 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 don’t communicate with
lines of business and therefore don’t 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).

August 29, 2011 © 2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited

Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q3 2011 3

Figure 1 Private cloud Deployments Are no longer Hype

“Which of the following initiatives are likely to be your firm’s/organization’s 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, 80%
data center consolidation, or server virtualization 79%

Maintain or implement broad use of server virtualization 80%
as the standard server deployment model 77%

Automate the management of virtualized servers 60%
to gain exibility and resiliency 61%

Build an internal private cloud operated by IT 29%
(not a service provider) 23% 2010 (N = 1,037)
2009* (N = 1,020)
Use cloud service o erings for storage-as-a-service 28%
or virtual-server-as-a-service at a service provider 18%

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
58821 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Figure 2 Multiprotocol use Is Gaining Adoption

“Which protocols do you use for networking virtual server hosts to the SAN?”

76%

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

© 2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited August 29, 2011


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 Business problem solved
Established criteria Thin provisioning Helps avoid capacity being underutilized,
therefore buying capacity when truly
necessary
Asynchronous and synchronous Both allow for data to be replicated more
replication e ciently depending on the requirements
Multiprotocol support Allows for exibility and tiering; not tied to
Fibre Channel environment

Primary deduplication Eliminates duplicates, saving capacity
Automated tiering Tiering maximizes resources, allowing for
high-end disks to be used for high
performance.
Emerging criteria Storage virtualization Accessing data regardless of physical
location/structure, managing storage
easier for di erent requirements
Stretch clustering Cluster nodes geographically dispersed
across distance, providing redundancy

Multihypervisor support Multihypervisor support allows for
organizations to leverage di erent
hypervisors for di erent workloads,
depending on the business need.
Object storage support Allows for metadata to be applied for
extracting more easily

VAAI integration Tie between server/storage to determines
the capacity needed for workloads; higher
peformance on servers


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



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
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.

· Primary deduplication. This is a process that looks for any redundant data. If it finds a
duplicate, the storage system will point to the original copy and eliminate the redundant data,
freeing up capacity. Although widely used in backup, it’s 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 isn’t 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 it’s 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.



· Multihypervisor support. Despite VMware’s 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
richer metadata to easily retract data when needed based on software capabilities with languages
such as REST or Java.

· 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.

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).



Figure 4 today’s Midrange Storage Market Offers A Wide Variety Of Solutions

Multihypervisor Support
synchronous replication

Object storage support
Multiprotocol support

Storage virtualization
Asynchronous and

Automated tiering
Thin provisioning

Stretch clustering

VAAI integration
deduplication
Primary

Vendor

Compellent*

Dell/EqualLogic

EMC

Fujitsu

HDS

HP (3PAR)

IBM

NetApp

Oracle

Pillar Data†

Xiotech

No focus Relevant domain 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

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. Dell’s enhanced



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 Compellent’s 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 doesn’t 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. HP’s 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 3PAR’s strength. iT has been a leader in this
space, and HP’s 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. IBM’s 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, Oracle’s 6000 became its midrange solution.
Today, the 6000 supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication. However, it doesn’t
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.



Category 2: Storage pure plays Offer The Best Overall economics
The storage pure play market is dwindling because of all the industry consolidation, but it’s 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 it’s still two different environments.

· Fujitsu Eternus DX440. The company has maintained a storage solution within its portfolio
for some time but hasn’t 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 it’s 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 Oracle’s 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.



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
It’s 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 you’re in sync.



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

eNDNOTeS
1
Recent Forrester inquiries from enterprise infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals show that
there’s 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 you’re thinking. For more information, see the May 25, 2011, “Q&A: How
to Get Private Cloud Right” report.
2
IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure or support
complex applications — but there’s no recipe, and many ingredients just don’t 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.
3
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, today’s 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. Today’s 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 Isn’t Your Dad’s Network” report.
4
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 it’s time for infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals to re-evaluate their impressions of the



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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Net App Scores 100% For Midrange Storage Market Solutions

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