E-Guide Virtualization Options for SMBS in 2011 Storage virtualization products are not just for large businesses. There are a variety of data storage virtualization solutions that are easy to set up and are priced right for small- and medium-sized businesses. In this SearchSMBstorage.com e-guide you will learn all about the virtualization options that are on the marketing for SMBs in 2011. Sponsored By:
E-Guide Virtualization Options for SMBS in 2011 Table of Contents Top SMB data storage technology trends for 2011 Data storage virtualization benefits for small businesses Resources from Dell, Inc. and Intel Sponsored By: Page 2 of 8
Top SMB data storage technology trends for 2011 By Marc Staimer It's crystal ball time again. Here's Dragon Slayer Consulting's forecast of the top 10 smallto medium-sized business (SMB) data storage technology trends for 2010. But before we get into this year's results, be sure to check out how we did on last year's predictions of the hottest data storage technologies for SMBs. 1. Primary storage data reduction will be popular with SMBs. Low-cost data reduction technologies from vendors such as Balesio and Neuxpower Solutions will become popular and help drive the trend. New Ocarina products from Dell providing low-cost unstructured data deduplication that works with compressed and uncompressed files will also help drive that trend. These products are designed for primary storage data reduction. They are able to significantly reduce already compressed files that deduplication and compression cannot reduce. 2. Low-cost enterprise-class multi-level cell (MLC) flash will be bought by more SMBs. With a price-performance curve that makes it a compelling value proposition for performancehungry 3. NFS will become the most prominent VMware storage for SMBs. SAN storage vendors may not like that prediction, but it is based on some pretty sound logical reasoning. NFS is built into VMware. NFS is the easiest VMware storage to set up, operate and manage. NFS is optimized for random IOPS, which are what virtual machine IOPS look like. A bold prediction? Maybe not. 4. All-in-one backup appliances will make significant inroads into the SMB market. An all-inone backup appliance includes backup and recovery software, dedupe, disk storage and, in some cases, tape. It's meant to be a plug-and-play device for small businesses that's "brain-dead" simple. 5. Cloud backup and recovery will continue to become compelling for SMBs because costs continue to decline rapidly, making its value proposition hard to resist. Operationally, it is Sponsored By: Page 3 of 8
similar to purchasing an electrical service, a phone service or an Internet service. Cloud backup and recovery has become a utility that just makes sense for most SMBs that take a hard look at it. 6. SMB storage costs will be increasing more than it has in the past for 2011. Yes, Virginia, HDD capacity gains have slowed. The era of 100% increases in HDD capacity each year, and an average annual decline in price per gigabyte of 36% are a thing of the past. Capacity gains still mean a reduction in price per gigabyte, but not enough of a gain to keep storage costs in check with the continued growth in storage consumption. Expect only a 50% increase in capacity for 2011 for the largest SATA drives (3 TB). Simple math calculations show that this equals higher overall SMB storage costs for 2011. 7. Cloud storage gateways will become very appealing for SMBs in 2011 from an operational and economic aspect. The gateways are designed to be primary storage that automatically moves older less-accessed data to the cloud. It keeps a small onsite storage footprint with a huge backend capacity. Expect this to be a very viable option for SMBs in 2011. 8. Acquisitions were a major trend for SMB storage vendors in 2010. Expect that trend to continue in 2011. It is tremendously faster and far less expensive for larger storage vendors to acquire innovative startups than it is for them to innovate. That trend appears to be picking up steam for 2011. What that means for SMBs are fewer vendors providing choices, but with less price competition. Overall SMBs should see nominal price (not cost) increases. Unfortunately, there will be less downward pricing pressure as well. 9. Emergence of the virtual data center for SMBs. In other words, no onsite infrastructure, servers, storage, etc. The SMB data center lives in the cloud. The applications, data, storage, data protection, etc. all live on cloud service providers. Don't expect this to be a major SMB trend in 2011 because of the immaturity of all the technologies; however, it will be intriguing to early adopters. 10. No matter your opinion of tape, it will continue to be the SMB's primary backup and recovery medium because of perceived low cost. But its market share is declining and will continue to decline in 2011. Sponsored By: Page 4 of 8
Data storage virtualization benefits for small businesses By Marc Staimer With EMC Corp.'s recent VPlex announcements, data storage virtualization is suddenly hot again. But as with many previous data storage virtualization products, VPlex is aimed at the high end of the storage market. However, there are numerous storage virtualization benefits that can and should be enjoyed by small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Virtual storage for SMBs can extend the life of legacy storage and simplify provisioning with thin provisioning or dynamic LUN expansion, and ease some of the burden of data migration. Data storage virtualization can minimize storage management drudgery with a single management console for multiple physical storage systems. Perhaps its greatest benefit is the ability to refresh storage systems while minimizing outages and disruptions. Unfortunately, many storage pros believe there are no attainable low-cost storage virtualization options for SMBs. They're wrong. It's not inherently obvious, but there are actually quite a few affordable SMB storage virtualization choices available. What is storage virtualization? But first we must define what data storage virtualization is for SMBs. Storage virtualization abstracts the storage image from the physical storage. This allows many storage operations to be masked from the application and users of that storage. In other words, storage can be operated, maintained, and managed with fewer management tasks as well as much-reduced scheduled application and user downtime. In this tip, the discussion will be limited to three storage virtualization types: file or network-attached storage (NAS) virtualization, block/storage area network (SAN) storage virtualization, and iscsi-clustered storage. Products in the file or NAS virtualization space include Microsoft's DFS (distributed file system) and AutoVirt Inc.'s file virtualization software. Sponsored By: Page 5 of 8
Microsoft developed Windows DFS for the small- to medium-sized business Windows-only (CIFS) business market and is part of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers. DFS Namespaces enables multiple different file servers' shared folders to be grouped into one or more logical namespace. Users see the namespace as a single shared folder with multiple subfolders and automatically connect them to shared folders in the same available Active Directory Domain services site. This alleviates unnecessary LAN or wide area network (WAN) routing. DFS Replication enables folders to be automatically synchronized between file servers locally or geographically distributed across a WAN. DFS gets a short shrift because of its limited feature set, management, the small potential for remote users to access out-of-date files and its inability to work with non-windows NAS. However, the price is hard to beat. On the other hand, AutoVirt alleviates every one of DFS' shortcomings including working with non-windows NAS while building on what DFS does well. Its management is user intuitive, provides great scalability beyond what can be done with DFS, is reasonably priced and solves many user problems. Examples of some affordable Fibre Channel (FC) virtualized storage systems include DataCore Software SANSymphony, EMC AX, NX, and NS series, FalconStor Software NSS, IBM Corp. SVC, and NetApp FAS and V-series (IBM OEMs as N-series). In the iscsi-clustered virtual storage space, there are a wide variety of reasonably priced products. Some examples of these products include DataCore Software SANSymphony or SANMelody, Dell EqualLogic, EMC AS, NX, and NS-series, FalconStor NSS, Hewlett Packard (HP) Co.-LeftHand P4000 series, NetApp FAS or V-series (IBM OEMs as N-series), Nimbus sustainable storage, Pivot3 UVS and RELDATA-9240i. Data storage virtualization questions for SMBs All of these data storage virtualization products reduce operational tasks, management and scheduled downtime and are worth considering for most SMBs. Sponsored By: Page 6 of 8
There are three remaining questions that an SMB might want an answer to: 1. How difficult is data storage virtualization to set up? For the vast majority of the aforementioned storage virtualization solutions, it is the opposite of difficult. Most are intuitive requiring little expertise. 2. What are the "gotchas" to watch out for? If the storage virtualization solution is an appliance, there will be an extra layer of management. The appliance will have to be set up and managed as well as the back-end storage. In general, each of the solutions will vary in their flexibility. But in order to provide an intuitive simple solution, assumptions have to be made by the vendor that inherently limits some of the flexibility. In other words, there may be some things that you may want to do but cannot because the parameters are not changeable. 3. What does affordable really mean? Generally speaking, it means that the total cost of ownership is equivalent to or in most cases less than non-virtualized storage. MSRP is all over the map with differences in tens of thousands depending on features, performance and capacities. Overall, if small businesses plan correctly, they can reap many benefits from implementing data storage virtualization in their environments, including simplifying management tasks and the ability to refresh systems. Plus, many products are affordable and relatively simple to set up. Sponsored By: Page 7 of 8
Resources from Dell, Inc. and Intel Creating a Business Case for Virtualization in the SMB Data Center The Business Advantage of Server-based (Versus Peer-to-peer) Networks - A Guide for SMBs Presentation Transcript: SMB Server School - Considerations for Integrating Windows Server into a Virtual Environment About Dell, Inc. and Intel Dell and Intel are strategic partners in delivering innovative hardware solutions to solve your most challenging IT problems. Together we are delivering virtualization optimized solutions to maximize the benefits of any virtualization project. Sponsored By: Page 8 of 8