Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) made
separate announcements today with a similar theme: new products
aimed at midmarket users continuing to experience storage growth,
now that high-end enterprise IT spending has slowed.
According to the latest IDC quarterly disk tracker study, sales
of disk systems with a value of $300,000 and above stalled in the
second calendar quarter, which backs up claims NetApp made last
month to explain a $60 million revenue shortfall. The IDC numbers
also show continued data growth at the lower end of the market,
especially in the midrange where iSCSI sales were up 57% year over
year.
According to executive vice president of product operations Tom
Georgens, NetApp, with the release of its new FAS2000 series
arrays, is making a conscious effort to expand its presence in the
midmarket. "It's not like we haven't been selling midsize products
at all, it just hasn't been a focus for us," Georgens said. NetApp
is working on new incentives for its channel, including a bundled
pricing program for software features.
The FAS2000 comes in two models: the 2020 and the 2050. The 2020, a
2U enclosure priced at around $12,000 with capacity up to 24
terabytes (TB), will only support SATA disks in its first release.
The 2050, a 4U enclosure starting at around $25,000 with a maximum
capacity of 69 TB, will support only SAS disks internally. The 2050
will also support Fibre Channel and SATA expansion shelves.
"Eventually we will support them intermixed," Georgens said.
Issues with mixing
SATA and SAS drives in the same enclosure
have surfaced across the industry in the last year, issues
NetApp also cites for the years between updates of its low-end
product line.
Despite the new focus for NetApp, Dave Russell, vice president
at Gartner Research, predicted that the majority of FAS2000 sales
will come from its existing customer base. "NetApp's channel in
this space is built to move boxes, rather than new capabilities,
like a virtual tape library (VTL) or ReplicatorX. They're going to
need a whole new incentive structure and maybe a whole new set of
partners to really go after it."
The reactions of
high-end and midmarket users to the product
reveal differing views on certain features. One storage
administrator for a large financial company interviewed by
SearchStorage.com last month said high-end customers have been
waiting for the performance boost and updated software features
of the newer system for use in remote and branch offices.
Meanwhile, a midmarket customer, John Saley, IT architect for
environmental engineering firm RMT Inc., pointed out that the
way NetApp has set up the remote management port on the box is
less than ideal for his purposes. "We've configured our storage
on an Ethernet VLAN, and traffic from the Web management port
has to go through the same channel," which he dislikes for
security reasons. But it's probably ideal for larger companies
sending data over a WAN, he said.
On the other hand, Saley also said that NetApp beat out
midmarket powerhouse EqualLogic Corp. for his business because he
liked having network attached storage (NAS), Fibre Channel and
iSCSI in one box, EqualLogic is iSCSI only and needs a gateway for
NAS, and liked the broad range of arrays in different capacities he
could get from NetApp for future expansion.
Russell added that a combination of the FAS2000 with NetApp's
A-SIS data deduplication could also find a toehold as a nearline
storage box. NetApp would have company there, too. Data Domain Inc.
announced today that it has added snapshots and replication and
retuned its product's performance to reposition it as nearline NAS
storage.
HDS: 96 PB of midrange storage
HDS' new USP-VM is meant to be a mini version of the USP-V array
announced in May. The USP-VM is based on rack-mounted hardware and
standard 220-volt power supplies, while its big brother requires a
raised data center floor and multiphase power. USP-VM supports up
to 72 TB of capacity internally and, HDS claims, up to 96 petabytes
(PB) of external virtualized storage, compared to the USP-V's
capacity limits of 337 TB internal and 247 PB external.
Performance-wise, HDS is claiming that the USP-VM is capable of 1.2
million I/O per second (IOPs) , as compared with the USP-V's 3.5
million IOPs. Software options for snapshots, replication, tiered
storage, thin provisioning and storage virtualization are the same
as on the high-end model.
While HDS isn't selling a "dumbed down" version of its product
for the midmarket, other midmarket products from competitors have
added simplified software management GUIs for lower end customers
with less expertise. Also, according to Tony Asaro, senior analyst
with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the price of around
$60,000 for a controller without disk or software licenses places
the product out of the reach of most midmarket companies.
"I get the sense HDS is going to be very negotiable on price
with this," countered John Webster, principal IT advisor with
Illuminata Inc, encouraging users to investigate possible pricing
deals. "They really want to see the USP platform become the de
facto standard for external virtualization in the industry." HDS
has also
simplified software licensing with the USP line, as compared to
previous versions of its arrays.
HDS says it has customers in Europe and Asia that are smaller
shops but still run mainframes, and that it will also market this
product to new Web 2.0 companies that require asynchronous
replication to push large files across the wire. No USP-VM
customers were available for a press interview, according to
company officials.
Another place where USP-VM could find a home, said Webster, is
as the shared storage for virtualized servers, since virtualized
storage can offer thin provisioning and easier migration of virtual
machines. "There's kind of a race going on between IBM's SVC and
HDS on who can get the most [business] out of latching onto the
VMware trend."