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by William Van Winkle |
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Reaching Into the SMBs When targeting businesses, your choice of what drive to plant in these scalable solutions becomes more critical. In the past year, several manufacturers have adapted their enterprise-class lines and brought them down to SMB levels. Examples include Maxtor's MaXLine III, Western Digital's Raptor and newer Caviar RE2 lines, and now Seagate's fresh entry, the NL35. The NL35 sports a choice of either SATA 150 or Fibre Channel interfaces (Serial Attached SCSI compatible), firmware optimized for data management, and a 1 million-hour MTBF. "The idea is that you would take your SAS-based system and have tiered storage," notes Seagate spokesman David Szabados. "You have your high I/O density zone where people are accessing data very quickly on your SAS drives and then, for your backup of that data, you can move to lower-cost SATA drives. In terms of cost, the NL will have about a 10% price premium over the Barracuda 7200.8 or .9." The NL35 will be in the channel during the first quarter of 2006. But products like Zemeta's aren't the only place you'll want to leverage these beefed up drives. On October 17, Adaptec at last launched its SAS blitzkrieg with seven products aimed at all levels of the SMB market, leaving the company with the largest SAS lineup in the industry, covering RAID controllers (PCIe and PCI-X), a host controller, and multiple storage enclosures.
"We decided we didn't want to just release point products when SAS first appeared," says Paul Vogt, director of product marketing for Adaptec's Data Protection Solutions group. "We wanted to come ready with full-blown solutions. I went out with the salespeople after the Ultra320 transition, and I heard, ‘Boy, that was really hard for us. We got your controller, we got the backplane from somebody else, then we got drives, then went to integrate, and we ran into trouble.' Our server deployment actually dropped because of incompatibility issues, and we had to be the ones to go back and integrate this technology. So the next time, I told our guys to do it different. Let's release solutions so our customers can take these products, put them together, they work, they immediately see the benefits, and they can immediately deploy them into the industry." The beauty of SAS, of course, is that it lets VARs deliver a flexible architecture that works just as well with SAS as SATA drives. Vogt notes that a lot of Adaptec customers are putting their SATA drives on SAS controllers and being pleasantly surprised at the performance gains. This proves very useful in video work or any application with long, sequential reads and writes—RAID 5 and RAID 6 applications, for instance. (RAID 5 protects against one drive failure and requires at least three drives; RAID 6 protects against two drive failures and requires at least four.) This flexibility once again proves useful in tiered storage scenarios where data lifecycle management can save clients substantial money over time. Use SAS drives for live, mission critical data, and when files can be safely benched into near-line storage, use less expensive SATA drives such as the NL35 for reliable archiving. Such divisions can even coexist and be managed easily within the same enclosure. Note that "video" doesn't always mean non-linear editing in Adobe Premier. Resellers can get imaginative with how robust SAS systems can help solve client needs and profit handsomely from the effort.
"People want to deploy digital cameras all around their property and their businesses," offers Vogt in one example, "and they want to store that data. SAS gives you an inexpensive way to do that. You have your controller inside the server, a couple drives inside the box, and you go outside to a JBOD. Our [SANbloc S50] JBOD has 12 drives in it, so you can put 6TB of data in there on 500GB drives, and you can also daisy chain these. If you run out of space, just add another JBOD. Some of our online RAID utilities help grow your array to take advantage of that additional space. Similarly, another great application is voice mail. Relatively low bandwidth, not really mission critical data, but they want to save all their voice mails and continually need more room. This gives you a low-cost way to enable that with inexpensive SATA drives on a SAS infrastructure. It's enterprise connectivity for a small business price." Be aware that 2006 will see a much more rapid adoption of 2.5" drives in SMB applications. Enterprises are still experimenting with this, but Adaptec will have a 4 x 2.5" internal RAID enclosure out in the first half of 2006—a perfect fit for drives such as Seagate's Savvio series. Like other 2.5" drives, the Savvio is 70% smaller than a 3.5" drive and chews through 40% less power, meaning a significantly lower thermal output. However, the Savvio comes in SAS and Ultra320 interfaces and boasts a 1.4 million-hour MTBF. Striped Savvio RAIDs are matching even mighty 15K RPM Cheetah drives on performance, and since you can fit more data density into, say, a 3U storage server, 2.5" emerges as the more space-effective option for tomorrow's storage systems.
"Savvio enables the consolidation with smaller arrays and provides a 60% IOps performance improvement per box in this environment," says Seagate's Szabados, "and up to 140% performance density in an IOps-per-U environment. So ultimately your collective throughput when it's all said and done is going to be enormous. Savvio is also of great interest because it has enabled new types of storage solutions that the market has not had previously. In addition to consolidated, smaller storage arrays, Savvio has enabled a new class of 1U servers capable of RAID 5 with 130% greater total performance. Previously, a 1U server was capable of only providing a simple mirror setup with two drives." Again, imagination reveals excellent opportunities. Consider blade servers. Previously, blades were using notebook-class drives for very rudimentary storage. With Savvio drives, blade servers can now be offered with true enterprise-class performance and reliability. In a different vein, 2.5" drives can also be intriguingly applied in a portable setting that doesn't involve notebooks. We've covered CRU-DataPort's military-grade removable drive enclosures before in RAM, but they bear another mention here owing to some recent model updates. To recap, CRU-DataPort specializes in products that mount hard drives into tough aluminum carriers that then slide in and out of bay-mounted or external enclosures. Depending on the model, PATA, SATA, and SCSI interfaces are supported. Drives are easy to configure in RAIDs and can simply be pulled out and taken elsewhere for use or secure storage.
"The versatility of having a removable hard drive makes sense in a lot of different scenarios," says CRU-DataPort's Jon Johnson, executive director of marketing. "For instance, there's compliance with data security regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA and anything that has to do with medical information. If you've got even a small campus infirmary with a couple of PCs, that's considered health data and has to be locked down. HIPAA regulations say you've got to take precautions to keep patient data from escaping, and you see that happen on campuses all the time, because their security isn't always as robust as a commercial business's might be. Merchants are required to take steps to protect customer information. If you've got Skippy's PCs, a little one-man shop out of a basement, and that guy is storing customer information that could be breached somehow, you've got to take precautions to protect it. According to Gartner and others, the big CIOs aren't doing as much as they should about compliance, so it's a safe bet that the small guys just trying to survive are doing even less. You can provide an easy-to-use way to encrypt a drive, pull it out, and lock it up." Many of CRU's new models offer 3DES encryption across all drive contents courtesy of an on-board crypto chip linked to a removable key that fits in the carrier's front panel. (As a side note, if you want to offer this security but don't need the removable drive element, CRU's enDrive is a two-port PATA PCI card with onboard crypto chip and a backplane encryption key port.) Without the key, no one can read the drive. The DP25ec, the "Encryption Chameleon," adapts one 2.5" PATA drive into a 3.5" PC bay and delivers real-time encryption security that can be removed and placed in any system featuring a compatible bay frame. This is a quick and safe way to back up workgroup data, especially from machines kept off the LAN for security reasons. If the customer would rather not hassle with installing frames hither and yon, CRU's 25d, a close cousin of CRU's larger HotDock, is an open USB enclosure able to take any DP25 carrier. Another new opportunity within this product family recently arrived with the IDE-to-SATA DataPort Carrier, a variant of the popular DataPort V plus that now converts any PATA drive to SATA within the frame. "The exciting thing about this that you can now swap between IDE and SATA inside the PC," says Johnson. "We started this, actually, with a customer that had thousands of IDE drives in use at all their different locations, and they were looking at a multi-million-dollar issue with switching to Serial ATA. They wanted to keep using those old drives but otherwise would have had to replace them all in order to be consistent. This allowed them to keep using the old drives. It was a huge money-saver for the company. We're sure there are other customers out there who are going to see similar value in it." Know No Boundaries Even when you're working with small businesses, it's important to keep an eye on the future and not box your clients into a storage corner from which they can't escape. Even 20-person companies can consume terabytes by the day. All it takes is large files running through an automated process. The trouble is that conventional storage solutions aren't equipped to deal with such rapid growth. Consider online digital photo site Ofoto. The company has over 23 million users. Among them, they have 1.25 billion images hosted on Ofoto's storage servers, and over 80% of these pictures reside on Isilon IQ equipment. Prior to switching to Isilon, Ofoto had a traditional storage architecture based on Sun, Dot Hill, and Veritas, and they had over 300 separate network drives they were trying to cross-map. It was a management nightmare, and the larger the database got the more costly it was to keep under control.
Isilon is in the clustered storage business. The company's OneFS distributed file system integrates volume management, the file system, and RAID into one software layer that blankets every node within the cluster and provides superior fault tolerance. One of Isilon's key benefits is its considerably larger file system size. Whereas Net Appliance and EMC usually provide NAS solutions with a combined, addressable file size limit of 16TB, OneFS can address up to 250TB. Low file system sizes mean users need to add more volumes as they scale in size, and that leads you right to the problem Ofoto was in. "It creates a huge amount of complexity as you add additional storage resources," says Isilon's Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development. "You have to figure out what data to move where. And then what applications or what users do I tell? And how do I do that without any downtime or any manual intervention mistakes? Imagine if, say, your MP3 collection was scattered over 20 different storage drives. I ask you to play Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl". Now you have to figure out where that file is. That's one problem. "The other problem in large storage is that file requests get routed through a single server or single controller. That controller is a choke point. So if you have a lot of data sitting on disks behind that server, you now have an inherent bottleneck. That didn't matter as much in the old days when you were just doing a quick database look-up or a quick CRM request because the data being requested were fairly small. But if you're pulling down an image or a CAD/CAM object or a video or audio file or some 8MB PowerPoint, all of a sudden those bottlenecks become glaringly apparent. That's a real pain point for customers today. So our pitch is that if you have applications based on those older types of small data, by all means keep on buying the traditional storage solutions. Our Isilon technology was built from the ground up to handle the more robust needs of larger data types and applications today and going forward."
EMC and similar companies remain troublesome for much of the channel because their solutions are so complex. You have to deal with Fibre Channel switches, zoning, host bus adapter configuration, and much more, all of which requires specialized expertise and training. According to Goodwin, any capable reseller can install and configure an Isilon IQ machine in just 30 minutes because it's all self-contained and ready to go out of the box.
Presently, one-third of Isilon's business is repeat orders from existing customers, which bodes well for channel partners looking to build and solidify their customer base. Forty percent of Isilon sales now go through the channel, and the company wants to expand this to 60% in 2006, ultimately topping out at 80 to 90 percent. Models start with the 1920i (80.6TB maximum cluster) and span up to the 6000i (252TB maximum cluster), plus the company offers virtually snap-in storage network accelerators. Within this IQ group, pricing per terabyte runs from $7,000 to $12,000, but the real advantage is ease of scaling. Isilon contends that customers can scale up to 1PB of storage without adding any IT staff. This is the kind of solution you want, something rock solid that can solve problems for a wide range of clients with relatively minimal resource investment on your part. Simplicity is key for you as much as your customers. This is what drew us to Isilon, and it's also what makes so many of the other solutions we've discussed here great plays for resellers looking to take their storage products and services to the next level. Everyone needs more storage, and there's no end in sight for the growth in this market. Even if you're only starting out with enclosures among your consumers, move beyond bare drives and start thinking about how you can add functionality on top of capacity. The more a storage solution lends itself to helping groups, the more ways individuals will find to use it. Leverage the channel programs offered by all of the vendors we've discussed here and you'll find yourself swamped with ideas, all of which will offer better margins than anything you'll get selling bare drives. Storage is a gold mine, and if you're like most resellers, you've only scratched the mine's surface. Start digging. |
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