For me, the interesting question is how much of the cluster storage market will belong to cloud services, not by storage systems owned by individual organisations. I suspect a large proportion will live offsite in the cloud.

In basic concept, I actually agree with Robin though. Lower cost modular arrays can acltually integrate seamlessley with intelligent software to provide the same reliability and operational benefits of larger arrays. I term this concept “Optimized Data Services”, where intelligence in the fabric layer provides all the beneficial data services such as continuous protection, replication, virtualization, migration, deduplication, encryption, and thin provisioning services for mission critical and non-critical applications based on SLA.

The benefit? Storage becomes a commodity, operations are simplified, backup becomes a service (and the actual backup process goes away) capital expenditures are greatly reduced, DR is just always on, RTO is ZERO, RPO is 15 Min for both physical and virtual servers, utilization skyrockets, and since the solution is self healing, everyone can go home and drink beer at night rather than worry about servers or storage going down.

Keep it simple.

Your comments about storage clusters are quite real. I do have a concern that you have stated that IBM has no vision in this arena. Yet we acquired XIV for just this aspect. XIV is truly a leader in this arena and we at IBM expect to really see large growth in the storage market with this class of storage device.

Can you provide more input on why you believe IBM has no vision in light of the XIV acquisition.

Lloyd

“I should look into commodity server/storage pricing and get updated.”

Check out Sun’s new storage platform.

As for commodity servers/storage. Here’s a corporate rate Dell:

Dell 2950iii 2U rackmount, 2xL5410 processor, 32GB RAM, 2 73GB 10K drives in RAID 1, dual-redundant power, remote management card, and standard 5×10 maintenance:

$3,752

PERC6/e external SAS adapters, $591 EA

Dell MD1000 SAS-attached JBOD chassis, 15 1TB drives, basic maintenance: $10,828.

Or with 15 450G 15K SAS drives: $14,268.

Dell partners will do better than the “standard corporate rate” in many circumstances, however above quoted will be pretty representative of Dell. Generally these prices will be better than any of the big american vendors, although I wonder if Sun’s new 48 disk JBOD would produce a better $/GB ratio…

Joe.

Has the tipping point occurred?

Steve, I may be behind on the pricing. My general observation for the last 5 years is that the disk capacity part of an array is only 5-10% of the cost. Low-end commodity server/storage boxes do better at ~25%. And that is using Dell’s low-end server pricing where they charge $500 for a 1 TB SATA drive that costs them $100.

I should look into commodity server/storage pricing and get updated.

Robin

You can get clustered iSCSI from Dell for bear $1.50/GB if you go buy in chunks of those new 48 disk systems. And that’s in unit sizes of “1″.

If pNFS is your friend, I suggest negotiating with Panasas. They can compete with NetApp’s prices if you negotiate for a larger procurement.

Isilon can be had for a good price with negotiation also. I just set up an Isilon cluster. It really is as easy as they say: just plug in the systems into the IB backplane and click a button on the front LCD and away you go. Cluster OS upgrades are easy too: upgrade one node, upgrade them all. It’s really easy.

–Joe.

That’s like saying a DMX can front end a PB, or even better that a USPV can front-end 247PB. When it costs more than most companies make in a decade, it’s a moot point.

We’re talking about commodity hardware (read off the shelf x86 servers) running cheap or free software to create a storage cluster. My personal bet is that Sun will be the ones to do it first if they continue down their current path. They’re halfway there already, and have the building blocks to flesh it out. Their biggest obstacle will be their shareholders stomach for such unconventional methods.

As your definition requires, we have for years offered a GNS capability and the option to cluster multiple nodes (8 as of this writing) in a single namespace, but each box on its own can also support up to 4 petabytes in capacity with file systems as large as 256 terabytes. Clustering is absolutely a great option, but we believe customers should cluster fewer devices and reduce the amount of floorspace, power, cabling and management necessary to address their performance and scale needs.

Great to see comments from Marc of 3Par here as well. When Robin talks, the industry listens!

Robin,

Thanks for the ExDS comments.

We’re certainly seeing more customers look to discern between a performance / protection tier (AKA classic arrays) for mission / business critical applications and a capacity optimized tier (which is where you’d expect to see commodity based infrastructure) for almost everything else.

I think the hardware model is inevitably going to move towards a commodity (or industry standard) based approach for much of the unstructured content – the cloudier issue is what the software model will look like – for some of the mega-apps (Oracle et al) it looks like more of the classic array functionality will be driven by the app itself (like Exadata) but that drives deeper silo’s (each of the apps gets managed individually).

Would be interested to understand how much enthusiasm there is from the end-user community on an open-source model.

Ian

Low end SATA-based array storage can be procurred for something closer to $2.50 per GB usable (ie RAID protected) with the right commercial deals. I’m being conservative – it’s possible to do better than that.