April 14, 2006

Applications drive SMB storage performance and capacity

This how-to examines SMB trends, such key storage issues as data protection and content explosion, and traditional and emerging system components. Solutions that provide high performance and low cost, will present fertile, on-going opportunities for alert OEMs and system vendors.

By Jasmin Tremblay, Agere Systems

The ever-present duty to protect valuable data, coupled with unfathomable volumes of data made possible in part by advancing multimedia applications, are driving the need for new dimensions in storage technology.

Small- and medium-size businesses seek an efficient yet practical storage system tailored to their specific needs without overextending their budget. Conventional file-server/storage systems are drawing a long, hard look as new network storage tools continue to surface.

Performance requirements
Small- and medium-business networks are rapidly being upgraded. The Fast Ethernet-to-Gigabit Ethernet migration is accelerating. Office computers are now shipped with GbE network interfaces. New applications are steadily building upon the available gigabit speeds, and user-performance expectations are on the rise.

Moreover, network content continues to increase at an impressive rate without a projected slow down. Yet, the speed and performance of low-cost storage solutions have yet to follow. Several industry trends are leading to a surge in demand for low-cost and high-performance SMB storage solutions.

AMI Partners, a market research and forecasting group, recently released its top SMB trends for the next few years. Among the top projections listed is that the availability of scaled-down storage solutions will prompt investments among SMBs. The solutions available on the market today do not meet the basic performance and capacity requirements of most small- and medium-size businesses. The following information reviews a few trends leading up to these new requirements.

The importance of data protection
Despite the miracles of advancing computer technology, hard-drive failure and insidious viruses still plague the global desktop. Together, they have always presented formidable risk to the world’s electronic collection of valuable data.

While the percentage of enterprises and individuals that have experienced partial or total data loss is growing, large enterprises are wisely increasing and deploying corporate-wide backup services. In businesses of any size, important data must be stored, protected, and accessible in the event of equipment failure, viral exposure, theft, or disaster.

Indeed, the cost of replacing lost data can often be calculated exponentially. People are typically inclined to save and backup all important data. Unfortunately, many backup attempts, especially in SMBs, are left undone due to any number of circumstances.

In a fast-paced, SMB environment, backup operations can be inconvenient, time consuming, or even too complicated. Employee mobility and off-site employees can be factored in as well. Storage space allotment is a critical concern, and the storage system itself often requires technical expertise for optimum operation.

In addition, an increasing number of small and medium business are now equipped with technologies and information tools enabling them to work and interact with large businesses. SMBs are therefore required by default to institute fail-safe data-protection policies and to maintain secure systems with reliable data backup and restoration methods.

Critical improvement factors driving the need for efficient, reliable data-storage solutions and increased data availability in the SMB environment include:

GUI simplicity
Users want a simple point-and-click backup procedure from their computer. Today, most SMB low-cost storage solutions are only file-exchange systems. Performing backups can be more painstaking because files must be closed and then copied to a remote disk (e.g., network-attached storage, or NAS).

High speed
The faster the backup interval, the less impact on the user, the more the backups are successful. Slow backup procedures contribute to cancellations.

Size of storage
The bigger, the better. The increase of bandwidth-hungry, multimedia applications can literally eat up storage capacity. Often, users are limited by how much data can be stored.

Availability
Fingertip accessibility is critical to the type of media used to store the backup (RAID, SATA, geographical diversity).

Flexible restoration
SMBs need a brief and easy way to restore files, one that eliminates the need for an IS/IT technician, for example. Moreover, users often need to be selective, restoring only a few files and not involve the entire contents of the computer, which can be risky.

Affordability
The spiraling costs of backup hardware and software need to be more economical to ensure they are attractive to the SMB. To increase data availability in general, faster, and lower-cost solutions with much more capacity are required.

This needs to be coupled with simple and reliable backup software solutions that can be readily adapted to the needs of small and medium businesses.

A Word About storage tools Conventional file servers have long been the key player in large-scale data storage. But given the escalation of network content and the call for evermore efficient solutions, the slowdowns, setbacks, and service interruptions associated with many file servers become increasingly apparent.

File servers simply read and write or otherwise respond to all storage requests from users and other servers. They interface with storage units that are commonly SCSI-connected in a parallel cabling configuration to storage disk arrays.

Typically, only one file server can access the storage disks, and therein lies the difficulty. The file server itself can become an obstacle or bottleneck, or worse, a point of system breakdown.

Conversely, the newer network-attached storage (NAS) devices eliminate the need for a server altogether, enabling the storage mechanism to be stationed right in the LAN or transporting network. Although the LAN must now handle storage and backup transactions as well as normal user traffic, certified users anywhere on the network can directly and more efficiently access the data resources.

NAS equipment is optimized to quickly process read/write transactions and incorporates a network interface card (NIC) for communications instead of slower SCSI setups.

NAS technology offers several other advantages

• Eliminates delays contributed by sluggish file-servers or operating systems.
• Eliminates cross-platform issues by using a common file-server access protocol to process requests from a variety of network sources, regardless of the type of operating systems (Windows NT, UNIX, etc.).
• Replaces host bus adapters, parallel cabling, and file-server terminations with a user-friendly, quickly installed plug-and-play system.

Content explosion
Liberty Technology Advisors and other market observers forecast the doubling of data every 12 months over the next several years in SMBs. In fact, the data-growth projections are becoming increasingly difficult to predict because of multimedia content.

Digital cameras, for example, are now taking multi-megabyte pictures, desktop presentations are increasing in size, e-mail systems now support 10-Mbyte or even 20-Mbyte attachments, etc.

New devices can generate richer content at low cost; computers are up to speed to manage it, and networks can transport it. Together, these trends are leading to a content explosion.

The following tables illustrate projections for three types of SMBs. Each employee creates and gathers new data from e-mail, presentations, pictures, technical files, etc. The model below assumes a very conservative annual data growth rate of 75% and 10% employee growth rate within the business. Over a five year period, the amount of data that needs to be preserved is significant.

From a storage capacity perspective, the affordable NAS solutions available today do not meet most business data-protection requirements. More disks and higher performance are required to extract this large amount of data.