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Market Landscape Report Understanding the NAS Market

By Terri McClure

August, 2011 © 2011, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Market Landscape Report: Understanding the NAS Market 2

© 2011, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Overview: What is NAS? ............................................................................................................................... 3 NAS Defined .............................................................................................................................................................. 3 The NAS Market Today ............................................................................................................................................. 3

NAS Market Segment Trends ........................................................................................................................ 6 Size and Functionality Differentiators Among Segments ......................................................................................... 6 Architectural Differentiators Among the Segments ................................................................................................. 6 Why is the Scale-out NAS Footprint Increasing in Enterprise IT? ............................................................................. 8

Segmenting the NAS Market ........................................................................................................................ 9 Segmenting by Workload ......................................................................................................................................... 9

Making an Educated Investment ................................................................................................................ 11 Who Really Needs Scale-out Systems ..................................................................................................................... 11 Market Inflection Points ......................................................................................................................................... 14

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 17

ESG NAS Coverage ...................................................................................................................................... 18 All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of the Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at (508) 482-0188.



Overview: What is NAS? Every IT organization is different, with varying application needs that fuel demand for specific products based on a combination of price, performance characteristics, and functionality. This paper will take an in-depth look at the network attached storage (NAS) market and the factors that are feeding vendors’ obligations to address different price, performance, and feature profiles to meet user needs.

NAS Defined

It is critical to begin with a definition of NAS: a NAS architecture provides a central place to securely store and share file data. It can be thought of as a hard drive like the C: drive on a home PC or multiple hard drives, but it supports an entire network rather than just one computer.

With NAS, multiple users (called clients), including those connected via the Internet, can access the same shared files. NAS units connected to a network only provide file-based data storage services to clients. These are dedicated, high-performance data storage systems running embedded proprietary operating systems and shared file systems that handle file permissions and locking to maintain data integrity. A NAS device is purpose-built to store files and perform file serving tasks, removing the responsibility of file serving from other servers on the network; they are not designed to be general-purpose servers, and a fully-featured operating system is not needed on a NAS device.

NAS uses file-based protocols such as NFS (popular on UNIX systems), SMB/CIFS (Server Message Block/Common Internet File System, used with MS Windows systems), or AFP (used with Apple Macintosh computers). While early systems were often dedicated to supporting one protocol, today’s systems rarely limit clients to a single choice. The most common supported combinations are NFS and CIFS. Some systems have proprietary access protocols and require specialized clients be installed on every system that needs to access the NAS device.

The NAS Market Today

Data continues to grow, and management and efficiency problems continue to plague storage administrators. Even with efficiency technologies such as deduplication (technology that ensures the same information in the form of byte, file, or block is only stored once) and thin provisioning (technology which avoids allocating actual storage capacity until it is actually written to, optimizing storage utilization) available, users have not been able to stem data growth entirely. According to ESG research, one-fifth of users are reporting NAS capacity growth of more than 50% per year (up from only 13% who reported greater than 50% annual NAS growth in a 2008 ESG storage survey), and 54% of organizations with NAS installations are indicating that their storage capacity is growing by at least 20% per year (see Figure 1).1

1 Source: ESG Research Report,

Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/12/scale-out-storage-market-trends/�



Figure 1. Storage Capacity, by Storage Type

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2011.

Unstructured data and file shares are growing exponentially. Expansion in this area is exceeding that of other data types with an estimated 226 exabytes of archived file data being accumulated by 2015, dwarfing database- and e-mail-based archive data (see Figure 2).2

Figure 2. Projected Archive Data Growth, by Type


2 Source: ESG Research Report, Digital Archiving: End-User Survey & Market Forecast 2010-2015, July 2010.

17%

29%

33%

20%

2%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

1% to 10% annually 11% to 20% annually

21% to 50% annually

More than 50% annually

Don’t Know

At approximately what rate do you believe your NAS data storage capacity is growing annually? (Percent of respondents, N=259)

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Unstructured 11,430 16,737 25,127 39,237 59,600 92,536 147,885 226,716

Database 1,952 2,782 4,065 6,179 9,140 13,824 21,532 32,188

E-mail 1,652 2,552 4,025 6,575 10,411 16,796 27,817 44,091

0

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

300,000

350,000

Total Archived Capacity, by Content Type, Worldwide, 2008-2015 (Petabytes)

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/07/digital-archive-market-forecast-2010-2015/�



This growth is likely to continue in part because the economy is reviving and in part because organizations need to accommodate the relentless increase in file data. In short, NAS purchases are increasing.

ESG research revealed that 86% of midmarket organizations and 84% of enterprise organizations are using NAS for some tier of storage.3 As shown in Figure 3, the capacity of NAS storage (45% of ESG research respondents’ total disk storage capacity) outweighs storage area network (SAN) storage (36%) and direct attached storage (DAS) (31%).4

Figure 3. Storage Capacity, by Storage Type

SAN systems transfer data over the network in the form of disk blocks whereas NAS systems transfer file data. SAN and NAS systems are networked whereas DAS is dedicated to the file server to which it’s attached.


Many organizations use NAS systems because they are easy to install/deploy, affordable, and reliable—ensuring support time is kept to a minimum. Other factors driving adoption include ease of capacity expansion and ease of administration, especially when it comes to serving up files to heterogeneous clients.

The challenge is to manage high data growth without increasing storage costs. Two-thirds of the users surveyed by ESG are making net-new NAS purchases annually or semi-annually. As a result, they are experiencing storage sprawl, making increased capital outlays, and enduring rising operational costs. IT users tell ESG that they need a more scalable storage infrastructure to support rapid virtual machine growth as the physical scalability limits of traditional NAS storage systems are becoming a real problem.

NAS vendors have responded by offering solutions targeted at specific use cases, depending on the performance, availability, and scalability required. This has resulted in increasing fragmentation of the market with systems that specialize in certain performance characteristics. Over time, however, specialized segmentation will disappear as next-generation scale-out systems are engineered to increase applicable use cases. Indeed, that process is already underway. But before exploring the future of NAS, it is important to understand the present.

3 Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010. 4 Ibid

Direct-attached storage (DAS), 19%

Network-attached storage (NAS), 45%

Storage area network (SAN), 36%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Approximately what percentage of your organization’s total disk-based storage capacity would you say is associated with each storage type? (Mean, N=306)




NAS Market Segment Trends The overall NAS market can be segmented based on multiple criteria with each segment having its own requirements in terms of performance parameters and feature sets. It is possible to categorize this market in various ways: for example, by application workload type, workload size, or the vertical industry of the NAS end-user. Features and functionality vary among the NAS systems suited for each segment.

Size and Functionality Differentiators Among Segments

At one end of the market are the traditional NAS systems that are widely deployed in enterprise IT. Examples include the well-known NetApp FAS and EMC Celerra (now VNX) systems. These systems were designed to handle storage of important file data that must be quickly accessible—environments that are random access, transaction-intensive, and critical to an organization’s operations. These environments typically have a large amount of small files shared between users, so users need systems that can support a high level of file-based IO performance and a lot of short, small file requests.

Such NAS systems tend to be the most expensive to buy in terms of dollars per gigabyte. They handle important unstructured data and multiple users may need access to those files frequently. For example, if a catastrophic event occurs, an insurance company may need to make thousands of files holding claim-related data immediately accessible. These files are likely to be stored on a high-end NAS system architected with redundant backup, hard-wired reliability, and speed.

At the other end of the spectrum are organizations that “just need a file server” but also require some level of advanced functionality and reliability—these low-end to midrange NAS appliances have capacity that is measurable in gigabytes or terabytes, not petabytes, but still offer some high-end features and protocols such as thin provisioning, cloning, RAID protection, and data deduplication. Vendors like Overland Storage offer robust and well proven solutions (Overland has shipped over 300,000 SnapServers) targeted at supporting the requirements of small offices or remote locations up to small or medium enterprises. These systems typically sell for under $25,000, a price point that reflects their relatively less abundant capabilities but is still low enough to be attractive to smaller businesses and prosumers.

In recent years, a new dimension has emerged: systems that need an exceptional level of throughput. These systems, which can deliver a lot of data measured in megabytes per second rather than transactions per second, used to be highly specialized and sold in niche markets with edge use cases, mostly high performance computing (HPC) applications in universities and other research and development environments. Early systems were complex and required a significant amount of time and expertise to deploy and run. Today’s systems are much more advanced and easier to use, driven by a combination of user pull from new use cases requiring the exceptional throughput these systems can deliver and vendor advancements in the ease of use of the highly advanced file systems that underpin them, essentially masking the complexity of the underlying file system.

The net of the emergence of the second scalability dimension is that we now have two core architectural approaches to NAS systems. The next section will explore those differentiators and further segment the market.

Architectural Differentiators Among the Segments

In recent years, two architectural paradigms for NAS, called scale-out NAS and scale-up NAS, have emerged in response to the need to stay ahead of the unremitting deluge of data. These systems are built and then later expanded in differing fashions.

• Scale-up NAS: Scale-up NAS is designed to be monolithic and to scale performance, capacity, or throughput by adding resources (disk spindles) vertically behind one or two NAS heads within a tightly-coupled system that shares a common pool of resources that work together in tandem. Once the limit on storage is hit, a net new system, with a new file system to manage, is installed. These systems scale performance by adding spindles and typically perform well in random access environments requiring a large number of file operations per second. These are the traditional enterprise NAS solutions previously characterized.



• Scale-out NAS: Scale-out systems are virtualized systems that can scale horizontally across nodes and in front-end processing power as well as back-end capacity (via newly added processor or capacity nodes) while still working as a single system. Scale-out solutions increase performance, capacity, or throughput by adding resources (e.g., processors, memory, host interfaces) as loosely coupled systems composed of nodes that work side-by-side, in parallel. They often don’t need the levels of individual physical disk management, data layout, and performance tuning required by traditional monolithic and modular systems. These scale-out systems are typically designed for rapid data growth in file environments that require handling of very large file sizes without the performance or management limitations associated with scale-up NAS.

Scale-out platforms provide a path to increased performance and operational cost reduction—benefits that are increasingly putting these systems on the radars of enterprise IT buyers. Solutions can typically expand into the multi-petabyte range under a single system image regardless of how many physical nodes actually exist, providing an ideal platform for storage consolidation. They help IT reduce management costs and data center equipment footprint, which in turn reduces floor space needs and power and cooling costs. Increased storage consolidation onto a shared resource also means utilization rates are higher, so users get more “bang” for their storage buck.

Figure 4. Scale-up versus Scale-out Storage Architectures Illustrated


The key value behind scale-out systems is their ability to leverage the many processors, memory modules, and data paths associated with a clustered multi-node system and make these nodes work in concert to deliver a single file. Systems that claim parallel data services can break up a single file and deliver the pieces in parallel, leveraging all of the nodes and data paths at once to significantly reduce the amount of time from the point the file was requested to the point the file is completely delivered (referred to as latency). The analogy is that of a grocery store: if a busload of 30 customers comes in and it takes three minutes for each clerk to serve each customer, two clerks would take 45 minutes to serve all the customers waiting to check out. But if there are ten clerks working in parallel, the entire checkout process is done in nine minutes. Imagine the effect of such a performance increase on



a business in which speeding data analysis by reducing file wait times would have an immediate impact on the bottom line, like drug discovery or financial risk analysis!

It should be noted that as scale-out architectures have matured and become more mainstream in both block- (Fibre Channel) and file-based (NAS) storage systems, the line between scale-up and scale-out has started to blur. There are systems on the market that can scale in multiple dimensions—up, out, and linearly—to provide a flexible and “best of all worlds” approach. ESG includes those platforms that scale in multiple dimensions (i.e., scale-up and/or scale-out) in its overall scale-out definition since it is ESG’s experience that users consider them to be part of that category. Because of these various architectural approaches, it is therefore difficult for some technologies and products to be easily classified into a specific category. In such cases, ESG weighs the features and functions to determine if a system is more heavily weighted toward scale-up or scale-out and classifies the system accordingly.

ESG believes that scaling up and out will continue to play ever larger roles in IT as demands to support business growth flexibly climb ever higher.

Why is the Scale-out NAS Footprint Increasing in Enterprise IT?

Scale-up and scale-out architectures both have a place in IT today. Scale-out NAS is particularly important because it enables data access within one global namespace, providing all users with a single, logical view of files spread across many nodes through a single mount point or drive letter. From a business operations standpoint, organizations dealing with a huge influx of data are better able to keep a handle on that rapid growth via higher levels of resource utilization because they essentially have one single, massively scalable shared storage pool to manage.

For certain applications and lines of business, this ability is extremely useful. ESG research5

• Achieve faster storage provisioning times.

finds that scale-out NAS helps users to:

• Improve scalability.

• Manage the environment more easily.

• Attain improved data availability.

• Improve performance (both IO and throughput).

• Reduce infrastructure costs.

• Deploy and manage shared storage less disruptively in large virtual IT environments.

• More effectively support specific applications, especially high-performance computing applications (including emerging commercial HPC applications such as 3-D and 4-D modeling, seismic analysis, data mining, or large-scale simulations).

Industries that are in the businesses of producing digital media, generating oil & gas seismic data, providing health care services, or conducting biotechnology research are among the many vertical markets that have adopted or are looking to implement scale-out NAS. Scale-out NAS is particularly important to these markets because its ability to offer parallel data services is helpful when working with very large file sizes—all of the other efficiencies were realized as side benefits. Organizations in other industries and in general purpose IT are looking to scale-out NAS to simplify the storage and management of general-purpose office data, which is accumulating just as rapidly—essentially, they want an efficient central storage services infrastructure that can scale and grow with the business.

5 Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Trends, December 2010.




Segmenting the NAS Market ESG segments the NAS market according to two dimensions. The first is the traditional high end (“tier-1,” high performance/high availability) versus low end (entry level, consumer/prosumer) segmentation many vendors target. But ESG considers performance requirements as well, adding a second dimension to the traditional segmentation model. As previously stated, scale-out NAS systems initially targeted environments that required very high throughput (MB per second), such as HPC. Most of these systems struggle or downright fail to meet the intensive IO demands that traditional scale-up systems were designed for. The performance profile is very different—and many, many factors go into optimizing systems for either high IO or high throughput environments.

Segmenting by Workload

Use cases create very different performance demands on storage systems. Traditional NAS workloads that may be OLTP-based or just general purpose file sharing typically have a lot of small files and are, therefore, required to support higher levels of IO. Newer classes of workloads are large-file-intensive and require higher throughput. Figure 5 illustrates the typical workloads seen in terms of file operations per second (IO performance) and megabytes or gigabytes per second (throughput). Scale-up systems are typically very strong in IO performance while scale-out systems are very strong in throughput performance.

Figure 5. NAS Workload Categories


Figure 6 is a look from the more classic forms of market segmentation—from consumer to the enterprise—but adding the new dimensions of segmentation based on throughput performance requirements. From the initial inception of NAS, it has been designed for workloads that creep up the left axis from departmental and distributed to enterprise IT. Those systems designed for throughput to support file-based workloads and HPC have been highly specialized niche players. But as we’ll see later, IT workloads are shifting along the horizontal axis and requiring greater throughput.



Figure 6. Segmenting the Market Based on Workload/Use Case Requirements


NAS systems have been developed to optimize for one dimension or another and have specific use cases in which they excel. Applying systems where they don’t fit can have a negative impact on the bottom line, so it is essential to understand the use cases systems were designed for. For vendors, it is just as essential to sell to the appropriate use case in order to build a happy customer base.

Figure 7 shows the use cases where the most well known NAS storage systems excel as well as the typical street price points, though within a segment prices can vary broadly and this is a very general guideline. Up the left axis, focusing on classic IT segmentation, are the more established enterprise IT brands like EMC and NetApp. But, moving across the throughput axis, newer players begin to emerge: BlueArc (also sold by HDS) and Isilon (recently acquired by EMC). Further down the line, Terascala, Panasas, and DataDirect emerge with systems that meet the most demanding throughput and IO requirements.

It is also important to note that this is a broad guideline—the lines are already starting to blur as some of the scale-out vendors evolve their systems to better serve random access file IO. For example, EMC Isilon recently published record-setting SPECsfs benchmark tests that indicate it has made the leap and can compete with the scale-up NAS vendors. Gridstore is seeing some success with its building-block scale-out NAS for small to medium size enterprises targeting a general purpose NAS use case. Scale Computing is often used in virtual server environments that have unpredictable IO and bandwidth requirements and need to add data paths with capacity to virtualize the storage environment to better align it with the virtual server environments. Scale, along with RELDATA, are two of the vendors to truly target the SME market with a unified scale-out solution—most of the other scale-out vendors are continuing to go after large file, bandwidth-intensive applications. Nexenta just joined this select group when it released its Namespace Cluster functionality in June of 2011. So even now, as we highlight the divergent architectures, expect use cases to quickly expand and vendors to target adjacent markets and general purpose IT as they add features and tweak performance.



Figure 7. Where Top Vendors Fit into the Segmentation


*These products are file systems that are used as underpinnings in NAS systems from multiple vendors.

Making an Educated Investment Sometimes, a clear indicator guides the investment—in this case, it is a performance indicator. Those who need the bandwidth of a scale-out solution really need the bandwidth. A number of vertical industries require high-bandwidth NAS systems. Across the board, their file formats are getting more sophisticated, their file sizes are growing larger, and their data stores are mushrooming. This massive data growth is creating demand for innovative scale-out file storage solutions suited for high-speed IT.

NAS users in these vertical markets need an infrastructure that can economically scale bandwidth, manageability, and performance to previously unheard-of heights. Using traditional scale-up architectures in these environments is becoming unrealistic. A better choice is a scale-out NAS architecture designed from the ground up to grow and support extremely high-bandwidth applications.

Who Really Needs Scale-out Systems

Several major industries that once operated in traditional paper or microfilm-based modes are finding that today, their digital data stores are threatening to overwhelm them. These are attractive vertical markets for scale-out NAS vendors capable of providing high-performance application support.

Looking at the throughput versus IO model in Figure 8, these industries have many applications that require the very high throughput that parallel data services can deliver, exceeding the MB per second capabilities of traditional scale-up NAS systems.



Figure 8. Vertical Industry Affinity for Scale-out NAS


Interestingly enough, this chart would have looked significantly different as recently as five years ago. Many of the workloads in the upper right would have been crowded into the left hand side of the chart. But advances in processor technology—such as multi-core processing and much faster chip sets—and in video, graphics, and design software—such as 3-D CAD, 4-D medical imaging, and high definition TV, just to name a few—have created new types of workloads that demand a very different performance profile than ever seen before. They create huge files and multithreaded requests that a single or dual processor scale-up system would not be able to service in a timely manner: production can slow or the system can time out waiting for the request.

Taking a deeper dive into a few industries:

• Media & entertainment. The operating model of media & entertainment organizations has evolved dramatically. In years past, they perhaps once produced only print magazines. Those publications are virtually all “online-only” now. Not only does all editorial content need to be quickly available to readers and content generators, but all the advertising files do, too. Large video files are also exacerbating the data-growth problems at digitally-intensive media & entertainment companies.

In fact, today’s media & entertainment organizations are generating and protecting terabytes or petabytes of file data. At some enterprises, much of the data is being created at the edge—at remote news bureaus or CGI design studios separated from main data centers. That operational structure brings problems related to data replication for backup and can even impede the disaster recovery capabilities of the infrastructure. Media & entertainment organizations are looking to high-performance scale-out NAS solutions to solve a variety of problems—for instance, to improve the performance of a virtual server infrastructure or simply to ensure that information is instantly and always available to content creators and consumers. Some companies, like Facilis, focus solely on this market.

• Life sciences. Not surprisingly, organizations engaged in health-related scientific discovery are actively interested in parallel file system solutions offering high-bandwidth data transfer and massive scalability. At



these organizations, collaboration at an intensive level is typically evident. For example, the IT team may need to find ways to enable sharing of very large gene-sequencing files or proteomic data across thousands of researchers.

To be successful, these companies must accelerate their discovery processes; the faster they develop a new drug, the faster it can be tested and approved for use in real-world medical and scientific applications. One IT-centric way for such organizations to accelerate a drug-discovery process is to use a high-performance parallel file system infrastructure that never requires disruptive forklift upgrades.

• Oil & gas. Uncovering oil and gas reserves was once a guessing game. Today, it is a precise, scientific endeavor that relies on digitized data. Three-dimensional visualization to spot possible resources has become an ever-present tool for the oil & gas industry in the past decade as fields decline and extraction operations become more complex. IT managers working in the oil & gas vertical market are challenged to find NAS infrastructures that can support the sharing and protection of the huge data sets resulting from oil reserve modeling/simulation work.

Without an architecture that can maintain performance as storage capacity grows, sustaining a competitive edge becomes more difficult, mainly because the “time-to-result” (the extraction of the resource) lengthens. Scale-out NAS is a good solution for oil & gas organizations dealing with enormous computational simulations that, in a very direct fashion, hold the key to their competitive success.

• Traditional HPC/academics & research. Astrophysicists, molecular biologists, chemists, nuclear physicists, and even social scientists working in the public sector are heavy generators and consumers of data. For example, at the Large Hadron Collider run by CERN, the team in charge of IT was managing 70 PB of storage by mid-2010.6

Even far smaller research facilities (usually working in cost-constrained university settings or commercial labs) rely on high-performance grid computing and parallel file system architectures to support modeling and simulation efforts that could solve real-world problems and answer big questions. Their work requires low-latency network clusters that can handle extremely intensive performance and bandwidth demands.

• Financial services. These users, who are accustomed to managing extremely large volumes of transactional information, are also now heavy users of high-performance parallel file systems for efforts such as market-performance forecasting and business intelligence. These efforts involve files that are not just big—they are also long-running and compute-intensive and require a high level of data protection and immediate data availability. Financial services users in particular look for scale-out architectures that remove data-integration bottlenecks. Data integration is a core task in financial services IT. For these users, an ideal NAS solution is one that performs faster as the number of nodes increases.

• Manufacturing & design. Like the other industries identified, high-tech manufacturers, aerospace companies, nanoelectronics start-ups, CAD/CAM design firms, and many others also need tremendous amounts of storage and they are all looking for ways to optimize data management. Users in these industries need faultless capacity expansion to handle digital growth and improve information sharing among engineering teams.

Outages are severely economically damaging in these environments, so users in the manufacturing & design segment seek to deploy file-based storage that offers near-total reliability and easy capacity upgrades on the fly. They look for automation to assist with file-system administration, data movement, replication, and migration/tiering.

6 http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/lhc-computing-grid-pushes-petabytes-of-data-beats-expectations.ars and http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/9/16/how-can-the-large-hadron-collider-withstand-one-petabyte-of.html

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/lhc-computing-grid-pushes-petabytes-of-data-beats-expectations.ars�

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/9/16/how-can-the-large-hadron-collider-withstand-one-petabyte-of.html�



Market Inflection Points

The challenge facing most enterprises today is that file data growth is out of control. It is one reason that scale-out NAS, with its granular, “plug-and-play” growth capability, is breaking out of specific vertical use cases and becoming a major segment of the overall file-based storage solution market.

The Addressable Market

Scale-out storage has made its way beyond markets that require the bandwidth and performance of scale-out solutions into conventional IT environments as well.

According to ESG research, scale-out external networked storage shipments in commercial and government sectors will increase from 4,189 petabytes in 2010 to 62,834 petabytes in 2015.7

It is important to note that while most scale-out systems on the market are dedicated to supporting either block or file protocols, ESG believes scale-out platforms will follow in the footsteps of today’s scale-up systems and offer multiprotocol support at some point. ESG did not, therefore, forecast file/NAS and block/SAN separately as these distinctions become moot over time.

That is a 72% compound annual growth rate that far exceeds the overall 54% growth rate of external networked storage (i.e., traditional NAS and SAN). This aggressive growth represents a major transition from scale-up to scale-out architectures across the vendor landscape.

ESG expects 2011 to be a tipping point for net new scale-out external networked storage shipments: these shipments will exceed 50% of all net-new external networked storage systems in terms of terabytes shipped and revenue. By 2015, the transition to scale-out architectures will be almost complete, with scale-out storage architectures comprising 80% of all net new external networked storage shipments from a revenue standpoint and 75% of all networked storage capacity shipped.8

Figure 9. Scale-out Revenue versus Non-Scale-out and Total Networked Storage Addressable Market


7 Source: ESG Research Report, Scale-out Storage Market Forecast 2010-2015, March 2011. 8 Ibid

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Scale-Out Storage Systems $6,995 $10,925 $13,977 $15,710 $16,921 $18,319

Non-Scale-Out Storage Systems $9,758 $7,155 $5,339 $4,914 $4,842 $4,580

Total Addressable Networked Storage Market $16,754 $18,080 $19,316 $20,624 $21,764 $22,899

$-

$5,000

$10,000

$15,000

$20,000

$25,000

Worldwide Storage System Revenue, 2010-2015, (US$)

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/03/scale-out-storage-market-forecast-2010-2015/�



However, since there is never a true wholesale technology transition in IT (attested to by the continued use of tape and mainframe systems), ESG expects scale-out capacity shipments to level out as a percentage of overall external networked storage capacity in 2013 and maintain that roughly 75% market position as scale-up systems continue to be used in some remote office and departmental applications and to support IO-intensive standalone applications.

Big Data and the Importance of Throughput

The term “big data” typically refers to significantly large sets of data as well as to the tools organizations must use to create, manipulate, and manage them. Data sets become big data when their size and breadth grow such that it becomes hard to derive business insight from them. When a company is amassing data assets with rapid growth rates, the sheer file size or volume of storage and access operations creates new performance challenges that traditional architectures often cannot scale to meet.

Conventional NAS was a perfect way to store and protect many small files. If an abundance of additional small files were being created, then a scale-up expansion was a fine way to support the growth. But today, big data is proliferating. Even smaller enterprises are now moving large data sets around frequently. The biggest of the big data users, such as the vertical industries identified in the previous section, are known to create and move individual files that are each many terabytes in size.

Simply adding resources to storage, bandwidth, or computing power no longer addresses all of their needs. In the era of big data, users need their NAS environments to scale not just in capacity, bandwidth, and compute strength, but also in throughput. The sheer volume of storage and access operations underway is creating performance bottlenecks that traditional architectures can’t always meet. Big data files only add to the stresses. Today’s high-performance scale-out NAS systems, with their optimized controllers and clustering capabilities, may be the answer for companies that are rapidly generating extremely large files.

Virtual IT

In a virtualized IT environment, storage must be able to handle changing workloads, maintaining performance as usage demands fluctuate and grow. According to the results of a recent ESG survey, enterprise users plan to increase density levels on a per-server basis by 250% over the next 24 months.9

In virtual environments, scale-out NAS has a compelling value proposition relative to scale-up systems. The lower infrastructure costs, power efficiency, and relative management ease of scale-out NAS should put these solutions on the short list of anyone interested in deploying NAS capacity as a service via private or public clouds.

This means they will need power, CPUs, memory, and high-performance scalable file storage.

The operational savings associated with just-in-time scalability—reduced power, cooling, and floor space requirements; reduced storage management headcount; and faster response to provisioning fire drills—can all help create a more efficient and agile enterprise. Deploying a virtualized software layer can further free up resources and create cross-platform resource pools that IT administrators can efficiently deploy across the enterprise as needed to meet business requirements.

Scale-out NAS enables administrators to add nodes seamlessly as a virtual environment grows. Upgrades to a scale-out NAS environment are relatively easy and performance doesn’t suffer, which is one reason that scale-out NAS is well-suited for use in virtual IT environments where storage is allocated without regard for physical location.

The Cloud

Today, you can’t throw a stick without hitting something that mentions the coming cloud transformation. The cloud needs to be considered in two ways. First, we have the underlying file server infrastructure. Cloud storage infrastructures will require the type of elasticity and virtualized storage inherent to scale-out solutions. If users do indeed build private cloud infrastructures, it is a pretty safe bet that it will accelerate scale-out deployments.

9 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010.

http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/11/the-evolution-of-server-virtualization/�



The second consideration is cloud storage services. It must be noted that over time, ESG expects some onsite NAS business to be somewhat cannibalized by cloud storage service providers. There are solution vendors like Nasuni that provide a gateway to cloud storage yet offer a fully functional, “local-like” NAS experience. Cloud storage services vendor Nirvanix also offers a NAS gateway that ports to its service, and there are vendors like DropBox and Box.net that provide web-based file services. While these solutions are becoming an ever more viable onsite NAS alternative, a deeper dive into cloud storage services would be required, thus the cloud storage services market will be addressed in a subsequent report.

Alternative Approaches to Scale-out, Performance, and Cost Reduction

A surrounding ecosystem is developing in the NAS market to address NAS performance and scalability concerns. Avere’s scale-out NAS appliance is a clustered NAS front-end system that sits between clients that need to access file data and their bulk storage NAS systems. It virtualizes the back-end NAS storage systems, eliminating the need to manage multiple systems and creates a NAS storage pool that centrally houses file data and provides a high performing storage tier within the FXT system to service file requests that require higher performance—critical files that are often accessed or recent working sets that tend to have a high frequency of access for the first 30 days after creation. It can also act as an edge cache to reduce latency at remote sites.

F5’s ARX product virtualizes the NAS ecosystems and provides a layer that automates migration and tiering across NAS systems to optimize for cost and performance, even tiering out to a cloud storage service provider. AutoVirt offers similar functionality for CIFS environments, albeit without a cloud tier as of this writing. And a number of emerging solid state storage vendors are providing NAS cache divides that leverage solid state as a front-end cached storage tier.

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The Bigger Truth The NAS market is quickly evolving. The broad shift underway is a result of some end-users looking to unshackle themselves from the bonds of legacy storage systems, largely driven by the need for greater efficiency in general and better density in their virtual server environments in particular.

The ability to independently scale bandwidth, IO and throughput processing, and capacity on the fly are core requirements of next-generation NAS architectures. The majority of file data now under management was created as rich digital content. These are large sequential files and, in some environments, they collectively amount to multiple petabytes of capacity.

At this point, it is cost-prohibitive to simply “scale-up” with more racks and spindles to increase throughput and reduce latency. IO capacity and file serving performance need to be boosted by adding nodes granularly while remaining online.

The commercial adoption of high-performance computing applications and the growth of big data applications are beginning to change the look of the NAS marketplace. Many users who once worried mainly about managing OLTP environments and back office data now also require systems that can support high-performance parallel file processing.

The file data growth experienced by these organizations makes their requirement for high-throughput, high-capacity storage appliances more urgent every day. However, like all marketplace shifts, this IT transformation won’t happen overnight. It will take time and will most likely be driven from the top of a given end-user’s organization as storage administrators are notoriously resistant to change. Additionally, the current dominant storage vendors have legacy revenue streams that they will protect by promoting conventional scale-up NAS solutions to handle high-performance applications that actually would be better served with a next-generation scale-out NAS architecture.

It is possible that Web applications may be a tipping point in accelerating this alteration of the NAS market toward more and more advanced parallel storage platforms: Web applications, like big data workloads, already stress the performance boundaries of legacy storage systems.

Regardless of whether it’s blogs, video, or supercomputer-intensive 4-D imaging, content is easier than ever to create—and management is becoming harder than ever. The dynamics of the performance-driven computing market are evolving. Sooner or later, to meet efficiency and responsiveness goals, some users will have to consider IT transformation initiatives in order to capitalize on the high throughput, high capacity file storage solutions now available to them.



ESG NAS Coverage The following is a best effort representation of vendors that have briefed ESG analysts over the past six months. It is not intended to represent an exhaustive listing of all solution providers in this particular segment.

Table 1. ESG NAS Coverage

Vendor Products Website

AutoVirt AutoVirt www.autovirt.com Avere FXT Series www.averesystems.com

BlueArc Titan and Mercury www.bluearc.com

DataDirect Networks NAS Scaler, GRIDScaler, EXA Scaler,

xStTREAM Scaler www.datadirectnet.com

Dell FS7500 www.dell.com EMC VNX Series www.emc.com

EMC/Isilon NL, S and X Series www.isilon.com F5 ARX www.f5.com

Facilis Terrablock www.facilis.com Gluster GlusterFS www.gluster.com

Gridstore GS-1000 www.gridstore.com HDS HNAS www.hds.com

HP Proliant Storage Server NAS, X-

series www.hp.com

IBM GPFS, SONAS www.ibm.com Nasuni Nasuni Filer www.nasuni.com NetApp FAS and V-series www.netapp.com Nexenta NexentaStor www.nexenta.com

Overland Storage SnapServer www.overlandstorage.com Panasas ActiveStor family www.panasas.com

RELDATA 9240 www.reldata.com Quantum StorNext www.quantum.com

Scale Computing M, N and S-Series www.scalecomputing.com Symantec FileStore www.symantec.com Terascala DTS4500, TSS2500, Gateway www.terascala.com Xyratex ClusterStor www.xyratex.com


The purpose of this paper is to provide insight and understanding into market dynamics and the types of available offerings so organizations will be able to make educated decisions on buying and implementing one of these NAS solutions.

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20 Asylum Street | Milford, MA 01757 | Tel:508.482.0188 Fax: 508.482.0218 | www.enterprisestrategygroup.com

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