Two non-US companies are mounting big storage marketing campaigns
on American shores this spring: Gresham Computing PLC, marketing a
virtual tape library
(
VTL) and tape management product, and Moonwalk., an Australian
software player, with some big talk about unstructured
data migration.
Both of the players are talking a good game, according to
analysts, but will both be swimming upstream until and unless they
can land customers and channel partners in the U.S.
Moonwalk: Cutting out the middleware
Moonwalk's products were originally developed to move NetWare
files but now support all the major operating systems on its
host-based file management agents. The company officially announced
this week that version 6.0 of its self-titled
hierarchical storage management (HSM)
product is available for the first time on the U.S market.
Each of Moonwalk's agents is managed by a policy management console
the company has nicknamed Eagle, which pushes out agents to servers
at the initial installation and keeps track of the policies users
must set up to move files. Once migrations are completed, the
product leaves stub files behind on the original device so that the
file seems untouched to the end user.
Migration policies can be applied to different groups of hosts
and can be "layered," so that a user can set up different policies.
For example, applying to all Windows servers, as well as all
Windows servers running a certain application, without conflict.
The value proposition here is that in large environments, the
host-based approach cuts out middleware and appliances that can be
a throughput bottleneck.
Moonwalk's CEO, Peter Harvey, said there hasn't been much
pushback from end users about agents, since their installation can
be done remotely and doesn't require a reboot. "Our agents are
light as well -- for NetWare it's one megabyte and for Windows it's
between four or five megabytes." The product can get a little
clunky when it comes to using it with virtual servers, as the
company recommends an agent for each virtual host.
However, Moonwalk argues the host-based approach is what allows
it to support heterogeneous storage on the back end. "As long as
it's got a file system, we don't care who makes it," Harvey
said.
"We initially set off to find [a product for] email archiving
and stumbled across Moonwalk to solve our file storage problems,"
wrote one Moonwalk user, Martin Attfield, technical project manager
for U.K.-based tea company R. Twining & Co Ltd., in an email to
SearchStorage.com. "Moonwalk … allowed us to cap the capacity that
was on expensive disks and move over 1 million historical files
offline without our IT customers even noticing a change." Attfield
also said Twining hasn't had to add disk storage for file systems
to its EMC Corp. Symmetrix arrays since that initial migration in
2005, even though end users have since used about three times their
original allocation for files.
The product is also working with an often complex mix of Unix,
Novell and Microsoft servers, according to Attfield. "We have a
four-node NetWare Cluster with the data synchronized with a Windows
volume in a different data center, and we are able to Moonwalk both
sets of data to an EMC Centera cluster as single-instance storage,"
he wrote. "We've thrown a number of challenges to Moonwalk support,
and they are always very helpful and fairly quick at producing
fixes."
According to analysts, the product looks good, on paper anyway.
"ESG believes that organizations will archive over 43,000 petabytes
(PB) of unstructured file system information in the next four
years," said Mark Bowker, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy
Group (ESG) -- so there is a market opportunity, and the product
could be valuable there, he said.
He pointed out that the product does not address structured and
semistructured content types. At least one Moonwalk competitor,
Nirvana Storage, which is being used by the Department of Homeland
Security for similar data migration, addresses all data types with
its software). "IT organizations that have broad ILM
[information lifecycle management]
initiatives will look for products that manage all data types
throughout their lifecycle."
And it remains to be seen at this point what OEMs and resellers
will be looking for, according to Greg Schulz, founder and analyst
with the StorageIO Group. "The challenge with host-based,
nonmiddleware or appliance-based HSM in the past on open systems
has been the instability and complexity associated with scaling,"
Schulz wrote to SearchStorage in an email. "Key for Moonwalk will
be to establish some … reseller and OEM partnerships … and …
demonstrate to customers and partners their ability to scale
without introducing instability with regard to performance or
increased management complexity."
Gresham: The most popular VTL you've never heard of?
Gresham's claim to fame is a product called Enterprise
Distribu-Tape (EDT), which is a software product that translates
Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) into Automated Control System Library
Server (ACSLS) in big environments and can also automate management
of large tape libraries, like StorageTek's SL8500 silo. With this
product, Gresham claims to have amassed more than 300 Fortune 500
customers and 4,300 licenses in all, all through word-of-mouth
sales among big tape users with minimal outside marketing and
advertising.
Perhaps because such a niche market has run dry, Gresham is now
changing its marketing tune with a VTL product -- the Gresham
Storage Consolidation Platform (SCP) -- announced last fall, for
which Gresham claims to have 73 customers, including household name
companies, like Kohl's department stores. The new Gresham marketing
blitz will kick off in earnest next week with the planned
announcement of version 2.0 of its VTL with updates for scalability
and clustering. Leading in to that is an announcement this week
that EDT will now support x86 Solaris servers, which the company
said is the first of several new interoperability announcements to
come.
Gresham's differentiation with its VTL comes as a result of what
its vice president of enterprise storage, Keith Summers, touted as
the company's "Ph.D. in tape." Because of its heritage in big tape
shops, Gresham argued, adding disk cache to its EDT product to make
a VTL will be just the thing for its already captive market, and
with a blue chip customer base on its side, the plan is to
"aggressively pursue OEM and partnering strategies" in 2007.
With version 1.0 of the VTL, the company is touting the tape
management and reporting capabilities that have earned the product
a favorable review from Diogenes Analytical Laboratories Inc. The
analyst firm ranked the VTL right behind the EMC Disk Library,
gushing, "Gresham may not be a household name in the storage
industry, but we think their SCP product may be the 'sleeper'
system of the disk-to-disk backup product category."
Some analysts said Gresham's "Ph.D." in tape could pay off with
the VTL product that uses clustered nodes as a disk cache behind an
appliance that attaches to a switch behind multiple backup clients.
From there, the system moves data to tape over another switch on
the back end to the tape library while keeping a 1-to-1
relationship between virtual and physical tapes and reporting on
backup performance, as well as the state of backup media. According
to IDC analyst Robert Amatruda, "Gresham's VTL actually ports to
physical tape more elegantly than many prevailing open systems
VTLs."
Other experts, meanwhile, are not as impressed. W. Curtis
Preston, vice president of data protection services for Glasshouse
Technologies Inc., pointed out that the VTL is still limited to TSM
and StorageTek environments, though Amatruda said "they infer they
can get to [compatibility with other major backup products] very
easily," and that users already have plenty of offerings from
backup vendors when it comes to reporting. "To enter the VTL market
at this point, you must have what everybody else has and a whole
lot more," Preston said. Far from fitting that description, Preston
pointed out, "Gresham is missing a key component in that they don't
yet offer deduplication. Their answer to this is interesting, as
they say they're partnering with key vendors, [and] the only
vendors that are key in this space would be their direct
competitors."
While Gresham claims dozens of customers, none are available for
reference, including Kohl's. And while Gresham said the VTL will be
moved primarily through the channel, it doesn't really have a
channel to speak of yet. Only one company, Tributary Systems Inc.,
located in Texas, is rebranding the VTL for use with
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) NonStop mainframes.
It all leads back to the same issue for both Gresham and
Moonwalk -- partnerships and customer traction. "It's not unheard
of for companies, like Gresham, to fly under the radar screen for
awhile," Amatruda said. "[But] in today's world, companies need
global, Tier-1 OEMs to bring a product to the mainstream."