LAS VEGAS -- Attendees at Storage Decisions Thursday lunched with
representatives from Dell Inc. and Microsoft, who presented the new
NX1950 product jointly launched by both companies this week.
The Dell PowerVault NX1950 with Microsoft's Windows Unified Data
Storage Server 2003 (WUDSS) consists of a Dell PowerVault server
with redundant controller heads; the server, which natively
contains 4
terabytes (TB) of drives, can scale up to
15.5 TB using 45 drives by attaching the new MD3000 SAS array.
The product also includes Microsoft's
iSCSI target, acquired with String Bean
Software Inc., offering file- and block-level access in one
box.
At first, compared to similar NAS/iSCSI systems announced by
Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) and Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) in
recent months, the product's $17,000 "entry-level" price tag
($24,000 for 4 TB of capacity) seems eye-popping. But, Dell and
Microsoft representatives presiding over the lunch meeting said
there are a few reasons for that -- most of them relating to the
new Microsoft software features.
Included in the price of the product are remote and local
replication, as well as the String Bean target, which in other
systems must be added separately to the tune of thousands of
dollars, according to Bala Kasiviswanathan, group product manager,
Windows Server for Microsoft. The product also supports Windows
Cluster Servers, including the creation of a quorum disk on the
back-end storage and automatic failover, redundant RAID
controllers, wizards within the Windows operating system for
provisioning shares and setting up iSCSI targets and snapshots,
without an added charge for capacity. Windows Unified Data Storage
Server also comes with hooks into Microsoft's Data Protection
Manager and Dell's IT Assistant management software.
In addition to the management features, all of which, according
to the companies, are included in one management console, multiple
instances of the product can be managed remotely through WUDSS as
well.
This was the product's chief appeal to Ryan Murphy, a storage
management contractor with the military, who said he was in the
market for a box like this for between 15 and 20 remote sites; he
said he had evaluated products like the Dell/EMC AX150 but was
intrigued so far with what he had heard about the remote management
features in the NX1950.
"The important thing to me is that I be able to see the status
and basic configuration of each device I'm managing within the main
console screen," Murphy said. "I don't want to have to go out and
touch each one to monitor them." Murphy said he had yet to see the
device demonstrated; according to Microsoft officials, that kind of
centralized management is not available in WUDSS.
"Price wise, though, it fulfills a lot of what we need for a
lost less than other products with all the same features," Murphy
said.
Another user, Craig Southwick, supervisor, server administration
for the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), said the product was
too small for his purposes -- UNLV's Dell shop is running on
rebranded Clariion CX300s -- but said smaller Dell and Windows
shops might be interested in the product despite the price tag.
"I've noticed that many of their lower end products are pretty
expensive compared to what else is out there, but there's more
support if you go with Dell -- that's the appeal for customers who
have them as a preferred vendor," Southwick said. "You know they
have a lot more support resources and internal testing than many
other companies producing low-end products."
Users also said that the fact that the product is produced and
supported through Microsoft, and runs on a Windows interface, held
some appeal as well. "For remote management, I need people to be
able to give out storage space without a learning curve," Murphy
said. "Most people know the Windows interface."
Murphy also said he appreciated that the product wouldn't
require backups using NDMP, a sentiment echoed by others at the
lunch. "I love that we can use regular [backup] clients and not
NDMP," said a storage manager from a major automotive company, who
requested not to be named.
Not every attendee was as impressed. "We have a SAN already,"
said Bert Sandoval, technology systems administrator, integrated
infrastructure services for a school district in the Southwest.
Sandoval also said he preferred to use SATA disks rather than the
SAS disks included with the NX1950, for cost reasons and because
it's a more familiar disk type to his administrators.
David Ping, data center storage team lead, information systems
and technology services for Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
(PG&E), said he has 30 remote sites to manage, but this product
probably wasn't a fit. "Why not just put a NAS gateway in each
remote site and let it communicate back to my main data center
SAN?" Ping said. "Why manage another whole piece of equipment?"
He added, "It may be a good fit for small companies without a
Fibre Channel (FC) infrastructure, but it'll be a tough sell where
companies already have an infrastructure in place."
SAS disks: Ready for prime time?
Both Dell and LSI Logic Corp. announced SAS-based arrays this
week, but experts said there's a key similarity to both products --
they're not terribly big, they're not standalone SAN arrays, and
they use 3.5-inch form factor SAS drives, though much of the hype
around SAS has been the better density of the 2.5-inch small form
factor SAS disks and as a lower cost replacement for FC in
enterprise arrays.
"At this point, there's kind of a glass ceiling on SAS," said
independent storage analyst Steve Denegri, who consults with the
SCSI Trade Association (STA). "There are some scalability
constraints and issues taking SAS beyond small DAS arrays."
EqualLogic Corp. is currently the only midrange SAN vendor to
have released a SAS array; the design of the EqualLogic system has
made that possible, according to EqualLogic's vice president of
marketing John Joseph. The EqualLogic arrays are made out of
modular building block chunks and expanded by adding more whole
blocks -- meaning the issue of pushing the protocol out over a
growing number of expansion trays is moot with the PS Series
system. EqualLogic's arrays are not connected via switching fabric
since they are iSCSI only, and while the overall storage pool from
EqualLogic can combine SATA and SAS, the two disk types are never
mixed behind the same controller.
Some experts, according to Denegri, blame the stall in SAS on
adapter boards in SAS controllers -- others blame the expansion
boards. But there have also been issues, Denegri said, with
tunneling between SAS and SATA; so far the two protocols are not
speaking to one another as easily as was first predicted. Finally,
no major switches on the market as yet have SAS ports available.
"It's something the chipmakers are working to develop," Denegri
said. "The array vendors are probably going to hold back until SAS
has been tested and revised a bit more."
"I don't think we'll see big SAS arrays on the market until next
year," Joseph said. As for small form factor, Joseph said he didn't
anticipate that it would be making its way to storage "until at
least early 2008."