Big Blue unveils storage on demand

With its storage on demand product line, IBM is matching Sun’s N1 line-up, and raising the ante with its SAN Integration Servers (SIS) offering. IBM is committed to open SNIA standards and Prashant L Rao finds its solution to the problem of storage utilisation to be quite intriguing

Rather than network a few boxes, you turn your storage set-up into a storage cloud. You plug in a desktop or server and get as many megabytes as you want, explains Ooi Sze kai

A IBM customer research study conducted in the fourth quarter of 2002 at over 200 of Big Blue’s global customers found that average utilisation was only 48 percent and that companies using SAN could save big time by moving to a virtualised environment. Utilisation rates in a company’s IT infrastructure hover between 20 and 50 percent with network utilisation ranging between 20 to 30 percent. “Our goal is to increase utilisation levels to 75 percent,” says Ooi Sze Kai, brand executive, Storage Systems Group, ASEAN/SA at IBM.

For every dollar spent on storage, six times that amount is spent managing it. That’s a global figure; comparable statistics for India would doubtless be lower than that, but storage management is a complex and expensive issue.

IBM storage on demand
“This is the third act of storage. The first was DAS, the second was SAN and now the third is on-demand storage,” says Sze Kai. “Rather than network a few boxes, you turn it [your storage set-up] into a storage cloud. You plug in a desktop or server and get as many megabytes as you want based upon the policies defined by the system administrator. These policies can be used to determine the amount of disk space permitted for each user and the kind of service levels and protection that should be provided for that particular user’s data,” he adds.

Storage on demand, as IBM calls its latest slew of storage products and services, promises to let SAN administrators reallocate storage and bandwidth on-the-fly.

The contender—Sun N1
Sun’s N1 data platform is Sun’s storage virtualisation engine for data centres and a direct competitor to IBM’s Storage on demand solutions. Sun has the PSX-1000, a 16- or 32- port box that, when combined with Sun’s virtualisation engine, lets CIOs manage storage from diverse vendors, including EMC, HDS, IBM and, Sun. IBM’s equivalent solution is the TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC). Both solutions let storage administrators do volume management from a single console, allocating storage across boxes from various vendors by combining storage hardware in a data centre into a single pool of resources. Even the pricing of the offerings is similar. Sun Professional Services offers the PSX-1000 implementation service starting from $75,000 to $100,000 for the product and service. IBM expects a SVC rollout to cost less than $100,000 with advanced options such as mirroring costing extra.

Big Blue virtualises storage
IBM TotalStorage Virtua-lisation products provide a single, consolidated view of resources in a network irrespective of where the data resides. IBM estimates that companies using SVC will see a 50 percent increase in their storage utilisation. To get these gains, IBM is moving storage management intelligence from individual SAN controllers into the network by means of a Linux cluster appliance that Big Blue calls a ‘virtualisation engine’. The virtualisation engine moves intelligence from the storage box into the network. Traditionally, virtualisation software has resided on the host (the server or disk controller). IBM’s concept puts the virtualisation engine into the network in the form of an appliance server that plugs into the SAN—that’s the SVC.
How high do you want availability to be? “If you want to go beyond five nines, you need a very huge data pipe. The cost goes up exponentially beyond that level,” says Sze Kai. IBM is willing to provide very high levels of availability if the customer demands it.

Standards based products
IBM’s storage virtualisation products support SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Assoc-iation) standards including SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification). This lets SVC manage devices from different vendors. SMI-S does roughly the same thing for storage that SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) did for network management (all network management tools support SNMP). The SNIA has set a goal that all new storage networking products will use the SMI-S standard by 2005. As long as other vendors stick to SNIA specs, IBM’s tools such as flashcopy will work across storage boxes from diverse vendors.

Advantage storage virtualisation
In a traditional SAN, users cannot directly access files residing on a server that’s running a different OS. As servers and storage hardware normally come from diverse vendors, this can be a real issue. Mirroring technology also varies from vendor to vendor. Each vendor has his own consoles and storage management software. SVC’s virtualisation engine lets administrators provides an additional layer that masks all this complexity and lets administrators reallocate capacity on-the-fly. Some of the advantages of using the SVC include the ability to mirror data on a box from Vendor A to a box from Vendor B, or even from a high-end storage box to a mid-range one, something you can’t do without the virtualisation engine. For instance, you could mirror data from an IBM Shark (ESS, IBM’s high-end storage box) to a FastT (IBM’s mid-range storage box). Also, by moving file sharing onto the SAN, the IP network is freed for transmitting application data. The console gives administrators a single point for setting policies regarding where a file is stored (on a particular drive/box), determine the frequency of backup and maintain QoS (Quality of Service) for storage. SVC also lets administrators control existing enterprise backup and anti-virus applications using policies.

Who’s it for?
In Asia South, IBM has reference sites in Thailand and Singapore at competency centres with regional partners. “It’s the same target segment as for SAN,” says Sze Kai. IBM believes that software development houses and government are potential users of this technology. In fact, any organisation using heterogeneous systems should benefit. Manufacturing and telecom are application driven; they generally prefer DAS, and so will be harder to convert.

IBM has follow up products to SVC, the most important one being the SAN Integration Server (SIS). This product is a ‘SAN in a box’. San Integration Server is a ‘pre-fabricated’ SAN. A full-fledged SAN in a box, it’s a 19” rack that contains the SVC, SAN switches and disks. This integrated and tested and certified (by IBM) entry-level SAN product is an ideal solution for SMEs. They can plug in more disks when they need extra storage.

IBM has a more rudimentary version of SIS called ‘SAN made Simple’. The product is quite successful in India, and 10 ‘SAN made Simple’ solutions are sold every quarter. While the number of full-blown proper enterprise SANs in India is in the range of 25 to 30, the ‘SAN made Simple’ variety of entry-level SANs has a bright future. Globally, IBM’s SAN Virtualisation Family is at medium and large enterprises. In India, expect Big Blue to focus on SMEs, particularly medium-sized enterprises.