Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

MS SCORES HIGH-END STORAGE POINTS WITH EMC'S NAS ENDORSEMENT
by John Abbott for the451.com

Microsoft scored a significant victory for its NAS operating system this week by snagging high-end storage vendor EMC as its latest licensee. EMC, which previously used only in-house OS technology for its NAS boxes, will license the Server Appliance Kit, recently renamed Windows Powered NAS, for a new low-end product line called NetWin that is due to ship in the third quarter. The move will lower EMC's entry point for NAS to $25,000, down from the current $167,000 starting price for the Celerra NS600 NAS box. That is low-end for EMC, but still significant for Microsoft, which has seen most of its deployments to date at the sub-$10,000 level.

EMC has also expanded its existing relationship with Microsoft, licensing some of the core storage APIs just introduced with Windows Server 2003, and agreeing to help Microsoft define future storage APIs. As part of that deal, EMC will integrate the APIs into its ControlCenter management console.

Impact assessment

The message

EMC is broadening its NAS line with a new family of network-attached file servers called NetWin. These are the first NAS devices from EMC to use Microsoft's Windows Powered NAS, previously known as the Server Appliance Kit, as an operating system.

Competitive landscape

Along with Network Appliance, EMC dominates the high end of the market, so its endorsement is a coup for Microsoft. However, about 30 other OEMs use Windows Powered NAS, including HP, IBM and NEC. EMC is partnering with two other of these OEMs -- Dell and Fujitsu -- that it says it won't compete against.

The451 assessment

By embracing Windows for its low-end NAS boxes, and tightening its relationship with Microsoft in general, EMC hopes to stem the flow of business away from its higher-end product lines by having its own lower-cost offerings on the books. Higher-end NAS boxes will still require alternative technologies for some time to come.

Context

Having gained over 30% of the NAS sector by volume in a little over 18 months, Microsoft now more or less dominates the lower end of the market with the support of over 30 OEMs, including Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu and NEC. But it has found the going much tougher at the high end, where NetApp and EMC dominate and players like Hitachi Data Systems are looking to stake a claim. Windows Powered NAS is essentially a Windows server that is customized for file serving, with non-storage-related features turned off and new storage management features added. Although it supports NFS as well as Microsoft's own CIFS file system, conventional wisdom has been that it's optimized for CIFS, and that those looking for the highest levels of NFS performance should look elsewhere.

As Intel-based server hardware has gradually become more powerful, more reliable and less expensive, Microsoft's pitch to larger organizations has been that they can improve performance, reduce administration costs and simplify management by consolidating hundreds of underutilized file servers -- Windows 2000 or NT boxes -- into a handful of clustered appliances.

Technology

Until recently, EMC had two different operating systems for its NAS products. The high-end Celerra NAS boxes used the DART operating system, while the midrange Clariion Chameleon IP4700 used software EMC acquired from CrosStor in November 2000. As part of its plans to merge its two NAS brands into a single line using the same technology base, EMC replaced the IP4700 with a new box last December, the Celerra NS600. For that it used DART as the operating system, adding only the NaviSphere graphical management interface from CrosStor and the OnCourse file and data management tool licensed from Signiant.

With the latest announcement it's back once again to two NAS operating systems. But to tie it in more closely with its higher-end NAS boxes, EMC will add a NaviSphere layer on top of the Microsoft operating system, and also use the OnCourse software. It will use an Intel-based server from its current server partners Dell and Fujitsu Siemens as the hardware base for the NetWin range.

The other part of the expanded Microsoft-EMC agreement is that EMC will integrate with its own storage functionality the storage APIs just introduced with Windows Server 2003. These APIs include Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), Virtual Disk Service (VDS) and Multipath I/O. VSS helps application developers implement 'application-aware' snapshots for file systems, databases and other applications. VDS forms a service layer that Microsoft says allows applications to manage multivendor storage array LUNs. MultiPath I/O enables more than one physical path to access a storage device and is used for fault tolerance and load balancing of I/O traffic. EMC will use VSS as an access method for its own Snap snapshot technology, work with VDS on LUN definition, and integrate MPIO with its own PowerPath product lines.

Competition

EMC will find itself competing directly with server vendors offering NAS versions of their own server-based products, and will find it hard to compete on price with these companies. Those with storage divisions themselves may be the most formidable. HP, for instance, already offers Windows Powered NAS servers, the StorageWorks NAS b2000, b3000 and e7000 boxes, with prices starting at $8,000. The products range from 200GB up to 'hundreds of terabytes,' at least via HP's SAN-NAS Fusion gateway technology, enabling a NAS head controller to share storage on the main SAN.

HP offers a parallel line of Linux-powered NAS devices, saying that although most users now have mixed CIFS and NFS environments, they usually follow the 80-20 rule, and typically opt for Microsoft only if CIFS is the dominant technology in use. NFS performance is still better on Linux, it claims. HP has also integrated OpenView with the new Windows storage APIs.

Meanwhile, Network Appliance finds itself isolated as the one major NAS vendor that doesn't support Windows Powered NAS. It protests that it doesn't compete in the low-end market, and hence does not compete with Microsoft or EMC's NetWin product. Its focus is on enterprises, mid- to high-end customers mostly in the Fortune 2000 list. Nevertheless, Microsoft's deal with EMC suggests it is now gaining traction with enterprise customers. Network Appliance may have to review its decision in the future. Although NetApp can gain access to Microsoft's APIs under the Communication Protocol Licensing Program, it may not get technical cooperation, and could find itself at a disadvantage when users want to run Microsoft applications such as Exchange.

Strategy

Critics say EMC was forced to go the Microsoft route when it found itself unable to scale down the DART operating system it already has. EMC denies this, and says simply that its customers were asking for Microsoft. However, it's unlikely that Linux or proprietary-based high-end NAS operating systems will fall to Microsoft, at least in the short term. EMC, for one, appears to have no intention of changing its software on Celerra NAS systems, either the midrange Clariion-based NS600 or the Symmetrix-based systems further up.

Courtesy www.the451.com