Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

DATA STORAGE: CHOOSE YOUR ACRONYM
By Robert Wills and Sarbjit Sidhu

DAS used to be a department, but the Department of Administrative Services slipped into history soon after John Howard became Prime Minister.

Going the same way is another DAS direct attached storage a data-management solution becoming obsolescent as new technologies and increasing appetites for data redefine the data-storage market.

Now the choice is between Storage Area Networks or Network Attached Storage. SAN or NAS? Choose your palindromic solution.

One federal agency to go the NAS route recently is IP Australia, formerly the Australian Patents Office, for its e-mail and document-storage functions. IPA's chief information officer, Sarbjit Sidhu, said last week that the 'very large change' in its data-management operations had followed a tendering process in which the tight conditions in the IT market had been an advantage. "We are a small agency and at times we felt that getting adequate attention from the vendors would be a bit difficult, but I must say that, running through this agenda, it has been quite good," Ms Sidhu said.

IPA's Desktop and Networks Manager, Robert Wills, says the agency's data volume doubles every two years or so, rendering its previous DAS approach increasingly inefficient and expensive. "Having discrete components of storage all over the network makes information discovery extremely difficult and providing data to people in the organisation very clunky," he said.

"We have (at present) a number of staff who spend a significant amount of their time managing data on our network. By consolidating the data we expect to be reducing that significantly; that's primarily where we expect to achieve the total cost-of-ownership benefits." Other benefits include less- demanding back-up regimes and reduced data duplication.

The selected NAS option offered by Network Appliance was also cheaper than SAN proposals by other vendors, partly because it does not require a dedicated hardware link with the network. IPA signed a three-year deal with Network Appliance, a California company in its tenth year of operations, which initiated the NAS solution to data storage. NA reported revenue of about $A2 billion in 2000, and is one of the 'big six' in storage.

The others are EMC, Hitachi, Sun, IBM, and Compaq. Under the agreement an initial 1.5-terabyte storage capacity can be doubled for less than half the (undisclosed) purchase price. "We (chose) a three year agreement simply because technology changes so fast," Wills said. "We have no reason to think, at this stage, that we would be changing our views or our approach over the next three years, but we couldn't really see a lot of benefit in locking in for five years."

NAS attaches storage devices to a local area network via an ethernet, whereas a SAN is a separate network of storage behind a LAN, connected via fibre-optic cable. The main limitation of the NAS approach is that data moves via the local network. "You can get a significant slowdown on your LAN," says Graham Penn, director of storage research in the Asia-Pacific for industry analyst IDC. The smaller the files being moved, the lesser the problem. For this and other reasons, NAS solutions are best suited to smaller agencies and enterprises.

Penn says Network Appliance offers applications that address some of the limitations, giving it an advantage which has earned it about 40% of the Australasian market. "They are the front-runners in the NAS space in Australia," Penn said. However, because of the accelerating trend toward technology convergence in this sector, the choice between NAS and SAN is becoming rapidly less clear. "By the time we get into next year the differences will almost disappear," Penn says.

The upshot is that the advantage in storage, like most other IT markets, is swinging strongly in the buyer's favour. One major factor behind this is faltering demand, which is affecting most IT areas more dramatically than data storage.

In the years before the dot-com crash the storage market was growing at about 100% a year. Now it is down to 10-20%, still healthy compared with most industries but a relative slump that has forced suppliers to battle for market share. Another factor is the over-all trend for technological advances to deliver cheaper outcomes.

Over the decade to 2000 the price of a gigabyte of storage declined at an annual rate of 25-35%. Last year this accelerated to almost 50%. "On top of that normal progression we had some aggressive price discounting as well," Graham Penn says.