The Storage Story

Prigmore says that it starts with deciding on the right storage architecture — SAN vs. NAS, for example. "It is no longer enough to buy a bunch of disk drives and turn it all over to your IT department."
David Quinones, partner with Accenture in Boston, says that things used to be simpler. "Recently, the CIO of one my clients, a global 250 company in the media and entertainment sector, called me up and wanted my advice on SAN vs. NAS," says Quinones. "I would have never gotten a call like that a few years ago."

Technology 101: SAN

PwC's Hughes explains the new interest in SAN as follows: "The SAN product life cycle is just like any other evolving technology. It got going a few years ago, but the value wasn't evident then. Now customers are starting to see the value proposition."
That proposition is all about economies of scale. SAN technology is currently for the large, enterprise-class customer. "A SAN is a fiber channel network of storage devices," explains Don Swatik, vice president of Information Sciences at leading storage hardware vendor EMC in Hopkinton, MA. "These are linked together with switches."

Since SAN uses special protocols, these switches don't come from the usual suspects in networking hardware, the Nortels, Ciscos, and Lucents. Vendors such as McData, QLogic, and Brocade are the players here.
In days of old, only a few years ago, most storage devices were directly attached to mainframes and servers. The problem with this architecture, explains Enis Konuk, director for the global storage practice at Sun Professional Services in Boston, MA, is capacity planning. "The traditional model of direct attached storage ties a storage device to one server," says Konuk. "This forces you to anticipate demand early, which usually means you buy excess capacity."

The upshot is that in large enterprises, there is typically a lot of underutilized disk space. Forrester estimates that direct attached storage in large enterprises is often utilized at only fifty percent or less of available capacity.
A SAN, because it sits on the network, frees this space for dynamic allocation. Multiple servers can now make use of the same set of drives. "This dramatically reduces the complexity of trying to predict where your growth will be," says Konuk.

Todd Paris, a senior strategist for KPMG in Los Angeles, says that this translates into reduction of cost and reallocation of staff. "I interviewed three global 100 companies that had recently installed SANs," says Paris. "We saw ROIs of over sixty percent in less than one year."
Paris actually did the study for Brocade Communications, a maker of SAN networking devices in San Jose, CA. "They wanted us to give them a business case for SANs that they could take to their customers. It really boils down to hardware savings. You need so much less 'white space' when you centralize storage in a SAN architecture."
"SANs are the way of the future," says Tony DeCicco, vice president of worldwide professional services at storage software vendor Veritas in Mountain View, CA. "And the beauty for consultants," he continues, "is that there is no product called SAN — you can't buy it off the shelf. It requires more than hardware and software. You need the right approach, and this makes for a classic consulting environment."
DeCicco says that deploying a SAN is analogous to something many consultants already know well. "It is like business process re-engineering for storage," he explains. "You need a brand new architecture, which is why it is a consulting problem."

So it is no surprise that most consultants who know storage are excited about SAN. But it isn't the only game in town, and, as Forrester makes clear in a March report titled Slaying the Storage Beast, SANs are not for everyone.
SAN networks are a new kind of animal and therefore require specialized skills that most companies will not find in their IT departments. Also, Forrester believes that the fiber channel protocols that power SAN are unnecessarily proprietary and that the market will eventually force a convergence with more traditional networking standards such as ethernet and IP.
Sun's Konuk agrees with this assessment. "I think SAN will move to an IP network. We think that SAN and NAS will eventually merge together."

Technology 101: NAS

As of now, the twain have not yet met.

"NAS is an external subsystem that sits on your LAN and addresses storage requirements beyond server-attached systems," says Eric Kelly, president of Maxtor Network Systems Division, a maker of storage devices (including NAS), in Milpitas, CA.

In simpler terms, think of NAS as a box that you can attach to your LAN just as you would attach any other device. Once it is there, it is available for file storage from anywhere in your local network.
Its limitations, when compared to SAN, are lack of block access (which can make NAS unsuitable for high-performance database applications) and the local area constraint.
Somewhat paradoxically, the local constraint is also an advantage because it means that NAS uses ethernet, one of the most ubiquitous connectivity standards around. The skills to set up an NAS system are, therefore, widely available. And NAS can actually reach out to the wide area. "It [NAS] runs TCP/IP," says Schreck, "so you can easily route NAS traffic over the Internet."

This does introduce problems of latency since most Internet architectures are not designed to support real-time, high-volume data access. But even so, Schreck says, "In most cases, NAS is good enough."
Network Appliance pioneered NAS technology with the first appliance-like NAS box back in 1992. Rod Mathews, director of investor relations at Network Appliance in Sunnyvale, CA, takes issue with some of the knocks against NAS.
"It simply isn't the case that NAS is limited to the local area," says Mathews. "You can use a dedicated ethernet channel to cover the wide area. And lack of block access does not mean you can't support large databases. Continental Airlines, for example, is using our products to store reservations."

Vincent Tobkin, director and worldwide head of the technology and telecommunications practice at Bain & Company in San Francisco, also likes NAS. "You can get a terabyte of NAS storage relatively cheap," he says. "An NAS device is self-contained, like an appliance, and it does just one thing, so it does it very well."

The Opportunities

Tobkin says that it is a good time for consultants who know their storage technologies. "Clients are really interested in the benefits now," he says. "A dream consulting assignment would be to work with the airline reservation companies. They are just starting to come off of older storage systems, mostly from the computer manufacturers. A real strategic question for them is, 'Can we replace these with SAN and guarantee the same throughput and response?'"
The question of SAN vs. NAS is really about usage, he adds. "NAS is great when you have a large number of people accessing a system in a local office. SAN is for data-center-class applications where the number of users will be fewer — a bank teller system for example."

Maxtor, a Fortune 300 company with revenues of $6 billion, is currently one of Bain's clients. "Maxtor makes a terabyte NAS device that is relatively cheap," says Tobkin. "This really plays to the strength of NAS. You just plug the box into your ethernet and everyone in the office gets another huge disk drive."
Bain is helping Maxtor navigate the complexities of the storage market. "Obviously they want to find the sweet spot in this market," says Tobkin. "It is very important to get it right — otherwise, you could produce an Edsel instead of a Mustang."
"Bain has been working with us for about a year," says Maxtor's Kelly. "They helped us validate the sense that there is a transformation underway in the storage industry."
In particular, Kelly explains, Bain confirmed the suspicion that companies are now spending a bigger percentage, as high as seventy in some cases, of their total IT budgets on storage. "Traditionally, storage has only accounted for about thirty percent," says Kelly.

Bain also identified three key vertical markets for Maxtor to pursue: financial, retail, and telecommunications. "The particular markets we target help define which applications we integrate into our hardware," says Kelly. "The financial industry, for example, needs good encryption software."
Bain also influenced Maxtor's product pricing and channel strategy. "We want to make sure that we hit the sweet spots in pricing," says Kelly. "Bain helped us set the entry price on our new MaxAttach 4300 box at $7,000."
"The channel strategy question for us," says Kelly, "was how much of our product should be branded and how much should be sold through OEM channels with other brand labels."
Bain helped find the answer, but Kelly says that it is confidential. "I can say that we arrived at an optimal blend."
Kelly says that the first phase of his company's work with Bain is done. "We had as many as nine consultants involved at one point, but now we are scaling back."
Ben Smith, vice president of venture development at A.T. Kearney in Santa Clara, CA, says that storage is following a familiar pattern. Eighteen months ago, Kearney, together with parent company EDS, launched Storage on Demand, a managed storage service for clients. "The storage business is becoming like the server business a few years ago. It has lots of potential. Storage is suddenly sexy," says Smith.

Sidebar: SAN vs. NAS

STORAGE AREA NETWORKS

• Network of storage devices linked via a fiber channel network
• Advantage: Supports block access, so may be more suitable for some high-end database applications
• Limitation: Technology is highly specialized, so it will likely be much more expensive to implement
• Type of network: Fiber channel
• Protocol: SCSI

NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE

• Class of service dedicated to delivering files to any device via an ethernet connection
• Advantage: More flexible than SAN and easier to deploy
• Limitation: Supports only file access, which may limit access to certain applications
• Type of network: Ethernet
• Protocol: IP
There are predictions that these two will merge into an IP-based storage network architecture.

Sidebar: No Moving Parts: Storage in a Solid State
The economics work against it, and the market is small, but solid state storage could be just what you are looking for: that technology which will add some value and flair to a consulting engagement.
Storing data in solid state DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) has one big advantage over the traditional disk drive method: There are no moving parts, so the "seek" time, or the time it takes to locate a specific piece of data, is dramatically less.

Now, this doesn't tell the entire story, since device-level access is only the first step in retrieving data. By the time the data makes it into the right application, other latencies can reduce that thousandfold advantage to something more on the order of two to three.

And solid state is considerably more expensive. "It is about ten cents per megabyte for traditional disk storage," says Casey. "With our products, you pay about ten dollars per megabyte."
But in certain environments this can be well worth it. Pravin Khanolkar, president of Dbcom Consulting in Iselin, NJ, implemented a solid state system for Charles Schwab two years ago. "They absolutely can't live without it," says Khanolkar. "When you have high throughput like that, nothing else will work."
Casey is the first to admit that solid state is a niche market. Tony Prigmore, senior analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, MA. has the numbers. "Last year the total storage industry did about thirty-six billion dollars. Solid state was only 87 million of that."

But he agrees with Casey that it is a growing niche. "I won't predict when solid state will really take off," says Prigmore. "But we think there are definitely some interesting futures here."