Storage on Demand
Written by Peter Buxbaum
MIT 2011 Volume: 15 Issue: 10 (November)
Less than a decade ago, the proportion of IT budgets spent on storage was in the single digits. Today, it’s around 30 percent.
The reason is that military organizations, no less than their commercial counterparts, have an insatiable appetite for data. They want to slice, dice, crunch and analyze that data, and never have to discard it. In addition, data sets are growing exponentially, especially with the increased utilization of video and other imagery in military applications.
The good news is that organizations have learned to manage storage more efficiently. “The consolidation and virtualization of servers means that you don’t need as many of them,” said Mark Weber, president of the U.S. public sector division at NetApp, a storage solutions company. “But with defense budget cuts coming, it is important that the military develop ways to get even more efficient with storage.”
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) was out ahead of the storage management curve when it awarded an Enterprise Storage Services (ESS) contract to ViON Corp. in 2007. ESS provides storage capacity as a service, and was the first sizable storage project of its kind anywhere, according to John Garing, a former DISA chief information officer and now a ViON vice president.
Garing added that DISA started the concept of capacity on demand in 2001. The first competitively awarded capacity-on-demand contract was the Assured Computing Environment in 2003. DISA issued a request for information over the summer, in anticipation of recompeting ESS next year. The RFI makes clear that DISA will be continuing its “on-demand service approach.”
The ESS vendor will also be “required to provide state-of-the-art storage capacity to meet new and emerging customer requirements and have the ability to replace existing DISA storage capacity that has exceeded its technical life.”
The contract will cover 11 locations in the continental United States as well as locations in Bahrain, Germany, Hawaii, Japan and South Korea. ViON will be vying for a renewal of its contract.
“DISA was a pioneer in the on-demand model,” said Garing. “It is not outsourcing, it is smart sourcing. DISA set the conditions and rules, and industry has caught on. ViON provides the capacity services and uses technology from vendors that provide storage. We provide storage as a service.”
The storage service works and is billed much as a utility. “We provide capacity on demand that DISA can turn on and off at will in a matter of days rather than months or years,” Garing explained. “They pay for it like an electric bill. If they use more they pay more. If they use less the bill goes down.”
Besides the operational flexibility that the system affords, configuring storage as a service also makes it quicker and easier to acquire capacity from a regulatory standpoint, Garing added. It also eliminates the practice of data center owners to overprovision in order to ensure adequate capacity. Garing believes that ESS shaved DISA’s overall storage costs by at least 30 percent.
“In my opinion the current ESS contract has been a huge success,” said Weber. “ViON has done a great job. The next contract will be even bigger and more important. DISA and its customers will be able to acquire storage capacity without having to commit capital to acquire equipment.”
NetApp is a provider of disk storage capacity under the current ESS contract.
Storage Modes
Storage media comes in a number of different flavors, such as hard drives—including solid state and flash media—online storage, disks and off-line tape storage for archiving, backups and disaster recovery. “We use all storage modes as part of ESS,” said Garing. “We do what the government wants. We are not locked into a particular vendor. We keep it as generic as possible.” Disks are currently DISA’s main storage mode, according to Garing. “They are moving more to solid state storage where necessary and where it makes sense,” he said.
The drive toward storage efficiency has meant that IT experts have had to rethink their metrics. “Storage used to be measured on the basis of dollars per terabyte of capacity,” said Weber. “That is not the answer for every application. We think more about storage efficiency. We put 90 percent of our research and development dollars into making better utilization of storage capacity.”
This efficiency is achieved through software that among other things automatically deletes data duplicates.
There is also the question of backup. All data needs to be backed up in order to be recovered in case of failure or disaster. “Different users and applications have different restoration requirements,” said John Pearring, manager of sales for STORServer. “Some need immediate access to lost data. In other cases they need to bring an entire data center back up within 48 hours of a disaster. Just because data is stored doesn’t mean individual users can all restore stuff the same way.”
STORServer provides an appliance that automatically backs up data to specified media.
Storage capacity acquired under the next ESS contact is likely to include more solid state and flash storage media and less use of disks and tape. This is attributable to advances making solid state and flash more cost-effective. Solid state storage is the fastest storage medium, but provides low data density and results in a high cost per unit of storage. Flash storage, although slower than solid state drives, offers a high level of data storage density, at one-fifth the price per unit of storage.
Pure Storage provides flash memory for storage, which performs better than disk arrays and at a lower cost, according to Matt Kixmoeller, the company’s vice president of products. Flash memory provides 30 to 50 times the capacity of spinning disk arrays, but normally costs 10 times as much.
“We do two things to drive down costs,” said Kixmoeller. “We use consumer grade flash memory instead of enterprise grade but we use a large pool of it. We also use in-line data reduction techniques like compression and deduplication of data, which allow us to store anywhere from five to 20 times more data on the same amount of flash, thus reducing its effective price.”
Kixmoeller sees three key advantages of flash memory over disks: performance, size and power consumption. “With a flash array we can deliver 10 times higher performance than a disk array, while the size of the array is 10 times smaller,” he said. “A data center can reduce a storage disk array from the size of a couple of refrigerators to the size of a microwave. Reducing the size makes the data center cheaper to operate. Flash also consumes much less power.”
Global Discovery Inc. (GDI) is offering to provide solid state server and storage enhancements to government agencies, which the company claims will be deployed at one-third the cost of traditional server storage and will provide a saving of 65 percent on energy bills for IT data centers.
“Solid state server and storage is a very well-kept secret,” said Glenn Ziccardi, the company’s chief executive officer. “But GDI and its teaming partners have been working with a number of companies on bringing this newest technology to government agencies. GDI appliances will be able to be shipped directly to military sites and self installed by local personnel.”
GDI’s appliance can be overlaid on the existing network without degrading current network performance, according to Ziccardi. “GDI’s patented solutions can collect or process multiintelligence information across agency boundaries and keep the data and network secure while collecting petabytes of information and providing superior analytics performance,” he added. “GDI provides capabilities using vendor independent and recognized standard protocols that enable the edge appliance to interact with legacy drive appliances and servers.”
Leveraging Software
Software can be leveraged to maximize the capacity and efficiency of data stored on hard drives, noted Weber. While NetApp’s spinning disk storage arrays can provide capacity exceeding one petabyte, the software that the company provides is what maximizes the efficiency of its disk storage space.
“Without the software, the typical disk utilization is only 25 percent,” he said. “With NetApp software, we can get utilization up to 70 percent to 80 percent on the disk.”
One result is that an organization can invest in a lower level of storage capacity. “With our technology, they are able to drive efficiencies in their storage systems and to lower their total cost of ownership,” said Weber.
The increased utilization of disks and the lower investment necessary in storage capacity also yields savings in space, power and cooling requirements for storage apparatus, while providing environmental benefits, Weber noted.
NetApp also provides virtualization software that limits the duplication of data by pointing users to an original stored copy of a data block. “This also maximizes the utilization and efficiency of disk space,” said Weber, “and also makes disk storage more cost-effective.”
Hewlett Packard offers a line of storage systems, including the HP X9000 active-archive disk system and the ESL G3 tape library, which also includes its StoreOnce Data Deduplication Software, an integrated disk-based backup appliance, to help manage storage capacity.
“Using disks for backup is changing the face of storage,” said Sean Kinney, director of product marketing at HP Storage. “Diskbased backup with deduplication is replacing tape as the preferred backup and disaster recovery medium. Specialized disks and tape are used for long-term storage and archiving. Disks are more expensive than tape, but much faster. Deduplication allows you to reduce the amount of data stored.”
The StoreOnce appliances can be configured in as few as five steps, according to Kinney. Earlier this year HP introduced the StoreOnce D2D4324, which contains up to 72 terabytes of usable storage with performance of up to four terabytes per hour. “The lower end of the line is generally used in small to mid-sized accounts and in remote offices,” said Kinney, “while the higher end products are generally used by enterprise accounts for their data centers.” Existing customers of HP management tools will probably not have to invest in or learn more software tools, he added.
STORServer provides a storage backup appliance that seeks to remove the complexity from backing up different kinds of data stored at different locations and owned by different organizations. “It allows you to get a handle on buckets of storage located anywhere from private clouds to data centers to work stations,” said Pearring. “An appliance is an integrated composite of equipment and software that connects to an enterprise’s communications framework and allows everything on the network to be backed up and restored.”
Capacity and Cost
The alternative to the appliance approach is to deal with hardware and software in pieces and parts, leading to potential incompatibilities and difficulties with service and support contracts.
“Our appliance is agnostic to the type of storage,” said Pearring. “The backup can be assigned to any type of storage desired and it allows for faster recovery. It also makes it easier to adapt to new backup media as those media evolve.”
STORServer’s appliance is sold through resellers and is usually installed as part of a larger project, such as a server reconfiguration.
Fundamentally, considerations of performance, capacity and cost will continue to dominate the thinking about enterprise storage and will be reflected in the renewal of DISA’s ESS contract. “There are going to be budget cuts,” said Weber. “To get the storage job done you need to take advantage of efficiency. The approach taken by DISA has the effect of driving down costs.”
At the same time, the military is going to require an ever growing level of storage capacity, density and performance. “They are going to be continuing to ingest big data files like video,” said Weber. “This is going to require high performance, or otherwise they won’t be able to get the job done. They need incredible levels of density. You can’t maintain football fields full of this stuff.”
ViON will be competing for a renewal of its ESS contract with DISA. “As the incumbent we know the customer very well and we believe we know what the customer needs,” said Garing. “We intend to leverage that experience going forward.” ♦
