by Andrew Reichman for IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

December 4, 2008 | Updated: February 3, 2009

Dedicated Application Storage Proposes more Simplicity And lower cost

by Andrew Reichman with Stephanie balaouras, christian Kane, ben Echols, lauren E. Nelson, and Alex crumb

ExEcUT I v E S U m mA RY
Its been the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years that to provide the best performance, protection, and capacity utilization for applications and databases, you need a robust storage array in a storage area network (SAN). But with low capacity utilization, the inability to prioritize application performance, long provisioning times, and soaring costs, SANs havent lived up to their promise. SANs also leave application, database, and system administrators at the mercy of storage administrators for all their storage-related needs, such as capacity, data copies, and backups. To regain control and get better results, application vendors are starting to subsume more storage functionality into the application itself, giving IT buyers the option to spend less on commodity storage and get their high-value features from the application. The time has come for buyers to question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about.

TAbl E O F cO N TE NTS
2 The Era Of SAN Hasnt Lived Up To Its Promise The SAN Promise: Utilization, Simplicity, Performance, And Availability The SAN Reality: cost, complexity, SAN Islands, And Incompatibility 4 The New Approach: Commodity Storage Managed By The App The benefits Of Application-centric Storage major Application And Database vendors Already Have The Ability To manage Storage 8 Some Storage Vendors Fight The Trend, But Others See An Opportunity Pure-Play Storage vendors Fight The Trend With Advanced Functionality System vendors Want To Sell You Storage Any Which Way You Need It
REcOmmENDATIONS

N OT E S & RE S O U RcE S
Forrester interviewed a variety of vendor and user firms, including Dell Equallogic, Emc, Hewlett-Packard, Ibm, microsoft, Oracle, Pillar Data Systems, and vmware.

Related Research Documents consolidate Storage vendors To Reduce complexity April 23, 2008
market Overview: File-based Storage April 14, 2008 Trim The Fat In Storage With Thin Provisioning July 23, 2007

11 Challenge The Conventional Wisdom Of SAN; Consider Other Options

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Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

For IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

THE ERA OF SAN HASNT LIVED UP TO ITS PROMISE Over the past five years, the dominant trend in storage has been the shift from direct attached storage (DAS) to centralized networked storage. Whether it was disk onboard a server or disk that was directly cabled to a single application server, the capacity was stranded and could only be used by that system, so utilization was poor and manageability was difficult. However, the transition to SAN has not solved all the problems as promised, and the new reality has been problematic as well. Here is how it has played out: The SAN Promise: Utilization, Simplicity, Performance, And Availability The value proposition for transitioning from islands of internal server capacity and DAS to the centralized architecture of a SAN has remained unchanged since the advent of networked storage. It consists of the following:

Reduced hardware acquisition cost through increased utilization. When servers use onboard
disk, no other applications can share the use of that disk, meaning that the required total headroom for the environment goes up. SAN is intended to provide a shared pool of resources, with less total spare capacity, and therefore lower total purchase price.

Less complexity through consistent management. The plan with the SAN is that all storage is

managed centrally and consistently, allowing environments to be more effective than if they had to individually configure and manage storage on each different server. Since arrays can be used by many different servers at once, the need for custom configuration and one-off management would supposedly be eliminated.

Better performance through increased aggregate spindle count. Spindle count is the single

most important performance factor in a disk-based storage system. When each server has a small number of drives onboard, they are restricted to a relatively small number of spindles, and therefore performance is limited. When applications use many small pieces of many shared drives, the effect is having more spindles available to each application, meaning more interfaces reading and writing at once, driving up the overall performance of the application.

Improved data protection through array-based replication and backups. Array vendors have
spent millions building and buying software that can manage the process of replicating data to a second site for the purpose of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). Similarly, backup applications can be more consolidated when data comes off of the SAN and onto media servers and then to tape, compared with connecting to each individual server to gather data to be backed up. All of this is supposed to lead to more comprehensive data protection for application data and higher success rates for the jobs that need to run to keep it all current, compared with a more distributed and therefore less consistent application- or server-based strategy.

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The SAN Reality: Cost, Complexity, SAN Islands, And Incompatibility All of the above benefits are good in theory, but for most enterprises, the reality has not been nearly as rosy as the vendor marketing messages promised. Instead of a consistent, shared pool of resources for all applications, storage in many shops is a thorny, complicated, and costly mess. Commonly experienced ills include the following:

Low aggregate utilization means high cost of infrastructure. Contrary to the initial SAN

vision, the amount of data written compared with the amount purchased at most firms hovers around 20% to 40%. This is a hard number to track, as most firms cant or dont track this metric, and those that do think about utilization mainly consider the amount allocated compared with the amount bought, which is a higher number but doesnt really measure real disk utilization. When it comes to actual data written, few in the industry would argue that utilization is better than this range. While vendors offering thin provisioning capabilities aim to improve this number, the actual impact of such measures does not seem to be significant so far.1 The vast majority of firms bought SANs thinking that they would improve utilization across their servers and applications, but instead they lumber along at a dismally inefficient rate.

Limited workload-sharing creates application islands. User firms cite a fear of putting all their

eggs in one basket. Project-based budgeting allows individual departments to buy their own storage. Application vendors have conservative best practices that discourage mixing workloads in SAN arrays. Storage vendors recommend headroom to allow for future growth and to avoid performance concerns. The end result in most large storage environments is that even in the supposedly shared pool of resources that is a SAN, islands emerge that are used for single applications only. Most quality of service capabilities are too complicated or too clunky for firms to truly take advantage of them, and the net outcome is that SAN-connected arrays are too often restricted to single applications, rendering them like DAS, only with an expensive switch in the middle. Smaller storage environments often have more workload sharing but still have more islands, less workload sharing, and lower overall scale-up of arrays than would be hoped for.

Vendor heterogeneity limits compatibility. All user firms balance consistent management

with inherited or purposeful heterogeneity in their storage environments, but the reality is that most organizations use several storage vendors.2 Acquisitions, distributed purchase decisions, the desire to keep vendors honest, and the belief that certain storage vendors are the only fit for certain key applications all lead shops down the path to heterogeneity. Storage virtualization promised to smooth the complexity of interoperability among competing vendors products, but the results have been limited, with the support issues often too complex to overcome and the lock-in provided by virtualization itself not providing a viable alternative to purposeful distributed purchasing. With distinct management consoles, different approaches to day-to-day activities, and the need for like-to-like replication targets, heterogeneity significantly decreases the value proposition of the shared pool of resources proposed by the SAN, instead leading to many distinct islands.

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Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

For IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Block storage devices have extremely limited context of information. While there have been

numerous marketing messages about information life-cycle management (ILM), tiering, and dynamic movement of data to match business value, the results of such initiatives have been minimal at best. Block-based storage systems have very little context about the information they store, and therefore no way to prioritize one piece of data above another. Traditional storage systems require contiguous disk striping, which makes it very difficult to move or change data once its written to disk. While newer, virtualized, wide-striped architectures make it easier to move, they dont provide a fundamentally better way to know the value of data or know where to move it. Most tiering schemes require complex manual data classification exercises to figure out what information is important and what isnt. The net result is that its too complex and too cumbersome to actually move data around in a dynamic manner, so it sits where it started.

THE NEW APPROACH: COMMODITy STORAgE MANAgED By THE APP Application vendors have consolidated significantly over the past several years, meaning that in the majority of shops there are fewer core application stacks that matter. Whats more, server virtualization can smooth out the differences among applications that run inside of it, especially from the perspective of configuring the right back-end infrastructure. Fewer relevant infrastructure stacks means less pain associated with deploying distinct islands of storage for each. DAS evolved to SAN, and eventually to application-centric storage (see Figure 1). If the application vendors can bring to market robust feature sets to manage their own infrastructure, and in the process significantly reduce the guesswork about interoperability, the complexity of management, and the price tag associated with deployment, then they could offer a far more compelling architecture than a one-size-fits-all SAN.

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Figure 1 Storage Architectures Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow

Yesterday Infrastructure type Architecture Connectivity Location Utilization Management tools Total cost Availability DAS Direct attached SCSI, FC Decentralized Poor: 40% to 60% Many, distributed by application High Low Today SAN Networked FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS Centralized Very poor: 20% to 40% Several, distributed by vendor High High Tomorrow Application-centric Clustered, direct attached SAS, Inniband, SCSI Siloed by application High: 60% to 80% Several, distributed by application (consolidated) Low High

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The Benefits Of Application-Centric Storage Forrester defines application-centric storage as storage architecture managed by a business application, such as Exchange, or an infrastructure application, such as a database or hypervisor. The back-end storage subsystem would be relatively bare bones, just offering storage media in a cabinet, along with basic cache and I/O support, and possibly hardware RAID. The application would deliver all the intelligence to manage capacity, snapshots, distance replication, reporting, and high-value features such as thin provisioning and deduplication. Key potential advantages of such an approach:

It will make it easier to design, measure, and manage defined service levels. Block-based

storage systems are blind to the context of the data that they store. A block is a block, and without costly and complicated application programming interfaces (APIs) for each application stack, storage arrays will always struggle to prioritize data. Since applications are already aware of user groups and know more about the data, they are much better placed to create and act on variable service levels within application infrastructure. Bringing the infrastructure directly under the control of the application will enable application administrators who better understand the needs of the business to control which parts of the application get what levels of performance and availability.

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Applications are more likely to have success with tiering than storage systems. While storage

vendors have been talking about tiering and ILM for years now, the actual impact of these concepts in the world of application data storage has been minimal. Storage virtualization has proposed to make tiering across heterogeneous physical storage platforms easier, but it also lacks the insight into data context and has been mired in squabbles over optimal approaches. It has had little impact other than offering better management capabilities and easing the pain of one-time migrations. The application stacks are much closer to the data, and are therefore better placed to manage tiering and archiving more effectively, based on the business value of the information.

The application-centric model can significantly reduce acquisition costs. By taking the

intelligence out of the storage arrays and putting the features previously resident there into the application software, user firms could spend far less on the storage back end. One of the biggest parts of storage cost is the software features included, so reducing the level of software in storage would have a big impact on cost. Since the application vendor is already charging for advanced software, the incremental cost of adding storage management features to the whole package is likely to be less than what it would cost from a storage vendor whose main value proposition is tied to the storage capabilities being offered. It amounts to shifting spend from one vendor to another, but if the net result is lower spend, then the shift is favorable to the buyer.

Managing storage from the application can cut out the middleman. The politics in many

firms favors the application teams over the server teams, so as application offers more capabilities, the money is likely to flow in that direction, favoring trusted application vendors over storage vendors, who have built something of a reputation for being predatory. Whats more, the relationship between storage teams and application teams is characterized by limited communication, and at times is downright hostile. This often leads to provisioning taking too long and application teams asking for more than they need to buffer against future delays. Eliminating the game of telephone between the teams and putting more control into the hands of those who know the application best will likely result in more responsible resource utilization and faster changes to the environment.

Major Application And Database Vendors Already Have The Ability To Manage Storage Several of the most important application vendors in the enterprise have already made moves toward enabling application-centric storage. In addition to enabling better customer results, they stand to capture a larger portion of customers wallets than if they let storage vendors skim off the top. Heres what some key application vendors have done to start moving the spend from high-value storage to the application stacks:

Microsoft recommends DAS for Exchange 2007. Exchange has long had a best practice for

configuration that precluded adding other workloads to the storage array it runs on, which has served to put it on an island. Now, with the addition of Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR),

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the application can manage its own high availability and replication. This has led Microsoft to release an extremely detailed and well-written white paper on the experience that Microsofts internal IT has had with Exchange deployment on DAS.3 Forrester has heard of a significant number of cases where Microsoft engineers are advocating a simple, low-cost DAS architecture for large Exchange deployments, using the internal MS-IT model as a best practice example. Exchange doesnt do RAID natively, so customers must buy disk systems that offer hardware RAID cards, but other than that, it doesnt need the advanced software or management tools of more costly SAN storage arrays.

Oracle offers an integrated data warehouse appliance, Exadata. In its biggest news at Open

World 2008, Oracle announced a partnership with HP in which the database giant will sell an offering that includes a hardware component for the first time. Using its widely adopted Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature to control the flow of data between application servers and storage servers provided by technology partner HP, the Exadata system is a hybrid of software and industry standard hardware that Oracle will sell directly and that will be ready to meet demanding data warehouse needs out of the box. ASM provides write redundancy as well as storage tiering and replication features, so the back end can be a set of bare bones server nodes with dense drives. Oracles software creates a grid-like environment where nodes can be added to increase scalability or replaced in the event of a failure, without disruption to the application. All of the intelligence lies in the application software, with no special software on the storage hardware and no interconnect required for nodes to communicate. Oracle is couching the solution as mainly aimed at data warehouse applications, but initial testing has shown that it can perform in an online transaction processing (OLTP) setting as well. Thus, it seems quite likely that in the near future Oracle will continue to push the envelope of how much storage intelligence can be subsumed into the application and take more wallet share from the storage vendors.

VMware already offers significant storage management capability. Being majority-owned

by vendor giant EMC doesnt make it easy for VMware to challenge the dominant paradigm in storage; nonetheless, the virtualization market leader has continued to add storage features to its application stack. VMFS offers volume management capabilities within virtual machine management, and its recently announced vStorage includes native thin provisioning and other key storage features. Site Recovery Manager and Storage VMotion allow for replication and high availability to be managed within the application stack, regardless of whose storage is on the back end. As VMware usage continues to grow in enterprise data centers, taking on more enterprise workloads, it provides a level of consistency across applications that, if it can maintain its momentum, would make an island of VMware storage all the more relevant.

SQL and SharePoint have limited storage features so far but could add more. Microsoft has

used iSCSI and VSS integration to be relevant in storage for its applications other than Exchange, choosing to influence storage vendor products more than take on their responsibilities. As

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Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

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Hyper-V gains momentum, becoming embedded in Windows Server products, its likely that more storage features like archiving, tiering data protection, and replication will be embedded within the application stack. While the iSCSI SAN protocol is central to Microsofts approach to server virtualization, there are many ways that it could use application intelligence to optimize storage functions, increase automation, and keep costs down within such a structure. SOME STORAgE VENDORS FIgHT THE TREND, BUT OTHERS SEE AN OPPORTUNITy The application-centric storage trend stands to significantly alter the power dynamic within the storage industry; predictably, some vendors are fighting it tooth and nail, while others see it as an opportunity to build strength. In general, volume vendors that can afford to get less revenue per storage shipped and make it up in overall market share and server attach revenue are onboard with the concept. Vendors that depend primarily on storage product revenue feel much more threatened. Pure-Play Storage Vendors Fight The Trend With Advanced Functionality The pure storage vendors are clearly put out by the notion that applications can take on the tasks that have been quite profitable for them for years. Recognizing the shift in focus that is under way, storage vendors have made a standard practice of marketing application-oriented storage. But in many ways this is not enough, providing a chainsaw level of granularity where applications that directly manage storage back ends provide a scalpel level of precision. The main points from storage vendors arguing their continued relevance include the following:

Application-specific management tools can optimize a general-purpose platform. In its fit

with key application stacks, NetApp has probably been the leader in promoting tools that make it easier to take advantage of a general-purpose storage system. The NetApp Manageability Suite includes snapshot managers that can pause an application long enough to make a copy, schedule when to make the copy, and make it easier to do granular restores using it. The management tools cover many of the key operating systems and business applications that matter today, including Exchange, Linux, Oracle, SQL, VMware, and Windows. Most other storage vendors have followed suit with similar capabilities, including Dell EqualLogic, EMC, Pillar Data Systems, and others. Pillar Data also adds the capability to optimize the provisioning of storage for key applications with large versus small LUN sizes and many levels of performance tiering to offer the right level of performance for each part of the application.

Depth of experience is more than the application vendors can offer. Delivering highly

available, highly performing, and highly scalable storage is not easy. Storage vendors have spent years honing their tools for storing and protecting data, and they argue that application vendors have a huge hill to climb to get to the point of taking control. There are so many moving parts and various configurations of heterogeneous vendors that storage vendors think their investments put them in a better position to solve these challenges than application vendors

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newly taking on these challenges. Multipathing and high availability with seamless failover is a specific element of the storage value chain that storage vendors are skeptical the application vendors can actually deliver as well as they can.

Small shops will still want a converged system for all applications. One of the most

compelling arguments of the storage vendors is that small environments, less than 50 TB or so, would not want to buy separate infrastructure for each application. These shops will most likely want a single system that can meet all their needs, and this is where converged mid-range storage systems are very likely to remain a good option. The storage vendors that will win are likely to be the ones that provide good scalability and performance; easy management; SwissArmy-knife precision for all storage functions, including file and block access in the same system; a variety of high- and low-performance drive types and RAID types; application specific management; advanced data protection features; and enough performance scalability to prevent applications from compromising each other.

File storage will remain the domain of storage vendors. Without a business application that

can take on management, departmental file storage is likely to remain the domain of pure storage vendors. Storage giants EMC and NetApp currently dominate this market, although there is wide adoption of Microsofts NAS software, which Microsoft offers through a broad variety of partners, with designs on taking a bigger chunk of the file storage market.4 Microsofts challenge is building bigger scalability and better capabilities on the NFS side; its product is currently deployed mainly in smaller environments. The other aspect of file storage is that more and more is likely to be federated into content management systems, which could push this part of storage further toward the realm of application vendors.

System Vendors Want To Sell you Storage Any Which Way you Need It System vendors such as HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems arent likely to fight the trend, as they are the most likely beneficiaries in terms of market share, even if margin would decline. Storage OEM vendors such as Xyratex or LSI could step up their value proposition and carve out a bigger niche by producing simple back-end offerings that could be the right fit at the right price for applications. These vendors will continue to sell their traditional SAN-based storage arrays as long as they can get big revenue from them, but theyre also looking ahead at ways to take advantage of the trend as evidenced in several offerings:

Industry-standard servers with dense drives are a common building block. Just like Google,

which uses many x86 servers as nodes within its proprietary Google File System (GFS) clusters, many application-centric storage solutions are built on an architecture of standard servers with dense drives onboard. The Oracle/HP partnership uses off-the-shelf Proliant servers with fairly dense drives and Infiniband cards onboard. Sun offers its X4500 platform that takes drive density to an extreme level, but neither the server, Solaris, nor ZFS provide clustering that

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would have to come from software installed on top. Dell and IBM also have servers that can fit the bill, so the special sauce comes in partnering with application vendors to prequalify and integrate the solution, and in some cases, to ship it pre-installed.

Low-end DAS storage boxes offer a low-cost platform, often with hardware RAID. Most

storage vendors offer a fairly stripped-down product family that is basically just a bunch of disks with or without a built-in RAID controller. For HP, its the MSA family, for Sun its the J series, for Dell its the PowerVault MD series. Any of these systems could be a good fit for an application that will do its own storage management, especially ones that dont do RAID natively, like Exchange. OEM and white box manufacturers could also be in a good position to partner with application vendors to produce a basic storage system at a good price point and still get acceptable margins, as this is very close to their existing business model of providing the hardware that typically gets augmented by branded vendors software.

Storage blades could be a good back end for applications. Bladed infrastructure has become

a good way to pack large quantities of server CPUs into a small space and manage them coherently. System vendors are pushing the envelope with storage blades that can put dense drives into a blade cabinet and still get consistent management and network port aggregation. A combined storage and server blade cabinet can be an extremely effective back end as a one-stop application infrastructure platform.

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11

R E c O m m E N D AT I O N S

CHALLENgE THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM OF SAN; CONSIDER OTHER OPTIONS

While its not for everybody, storage technology buyers should keep a watchful eye on application-centric storage options to consider if they represent a better solution than traditional SAN storage. If the features and performance arent there for what youre trying to accomplish, or if the cost impact isnt favorable, then this isnt for you. However, the possibility of bypassing SAN architectures for a fundamentally cheaper and simpler alternative is in the offing. When considering this architecture, think about the following:

If you have islands anyway, build them around the applications you care about. While
everybody strives for the mythical shared pool of resources, every storage environment ends up with islands built around geographic separation, heterogeneous vendors, multiple performance tiers, and business divisions. If you know that you cant satisfy all your storage needs in a single consistent platform, then give some thought to accepting islands but shaping them around the applications you care about most. If the applications can give you lower cost, more simplicity, and more information context, while still delivering performance and availability, then you might be better off than having islands that get built through compromise and chaos.

Size matters when considering application-centric storage. If you have a shop with 50 Tb
or less, then building islands around applications is probably not for you. Your environment will likely be better served with a consolidated, converged storage system with easy management capabilities and the ability to handle all your workloads safely and effectively. consider file and block convergence, along with advanced data replication, some reporting, and decent fit with applications you use. If youre a big shop now or expect to become one soon, give some consideration to application-centric storage, which would entail an optimized stack for each of the applications you care about.

Infrastructure can be an inflection point for application consolidation. If youre

thinking about tying your infrastructure to applications, it might be a good time to consider whether you have redundancies in your application stack and if you should be on a different platform. As the application vendors get more deeply involved in managing infrastructure, it is likely to become a major point of consideration for shops that are rethinking their application deployment strategies. If you depended on storage vendors before to smooth out inconsistencies in the application landscape, a move toward application-centric storage would force you to rethink, and possibly consolidate, to avoid the creation of too many different islands.

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ENDNOTES
1

Thin provisioning is a virtualization technology aimed at reducing the total footprint of storage allocation through oversubscription of resources. See the July 23, 2007, Trim The Fat In Storage With Thin Provisioning report. Companies continue to balance the technology benefits of many best-of-breed vendors with the simplicity of fewer vendors. Recent research points to a consolidation trend in storage, but heterogeneity is always a reality. See the April 23, 2008, Consolidate Storage Vendors To Reduce Complexity report. Source: Storage Design For Exchange Server 2007 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc500980. aspx). There are many ways to store files in a storage environment, but NAS is generally seen as the most consolidated and the most effective. See the April 14, 2008, Market Overview: File-Based Storage report.

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