Mid-range market heats up: competition, new levels of functionality drive enhanced mid-range TCO.

The mid-range storage array market has gained the focus of major storage vendors, with new products that continue to bring new levels of functionality to the market as traditional high-end features migrate downmarket and increased competition continues to improve the value proposition for customers.

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Recent product introductions from EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and others have turned the mid-range market into an increasingly important market opportunity, and according to vendors, the recent flurry of mid-range product rollouts goes beyond the typical periodic product refresh cycles.

"There definitely is more attention in this area. What the customers are saying to us is that storage is still way too expensive and it's taking up a lot more of their budget," said Hubert Yoshida, vice president and chief technology officer at HDS. "They're also saying that the majority of my storage is tier 1 and I really don't need tier 1 for a lot of my storage requirements. And they're saying it's not very well utilized even with SANs."

As a response to the need of mid-range customers for more cost-effective storage options, in July HDS introduced the TagmaStore Network Storage Controller Model NSC 55 along with two new lines of storage arrays: the TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage and Workgroup Modular Storage lines.

The NSC 55 is based on the same architecture as Hitachi's high-end TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, including its massively parallel crossbar switch architecture for high availability and performance; large-scale controller-based virtualization layer for ease-of-management; logical partitioning for application quality-of-service and storage-agnostic universal replication. The NSC 55 also offers the same virtualization functionality and can manage up to 16 petabytes of externally attached heterogeneous storage, including storage arrays from EMC, IBM, Hitachi, HP, Sun and other vendors.

The AMS systems offer high-availability Fibre Channel drives with optional SATA drives, while WMS systems are configured only with SATA drives for low-cost nearline storage applications, such as data archival for regulatory compliance. The ability to utilize modular storage behind the NSC 55 controller provides more customer flexibility to create cost-correct tiered storage deployments to more effectively to meet application-specific storage requirements, said Yoshida.

"It addresses the cost issue and gives them more choices in how they provision their storage," said Yoshida. "We recognize that not everything needs to be on tier 1 storage, but a certain amount of it needs to have tier 1 functionality."

EMC strengthened its midrange product offerings in August with enhancements to its Clariion family of arrays. The new Clariion CX300-s, CX500-s, and CX700-s Fibre Channel and iSCSI models are based on UltraPoint hardware and software technology that combines point-to-point connectivity to individual disk drives with advanced diagnostic capabilities--resulting in the higher levels of reliability and availability.

EMC's new CLARiiON Virtual LUN Technology provides seamless movement of data within a CLARiiON CX Series system. Virtual LUN Technology enables Clariion customers to move data volumes seamlessly online within their system without affecting the application. This unique capability allows customers to improve performance and capacity utilization, for example, by moving data from Fibre Channel to ATA-based disks to create multiple tiers of storage within the array

The UltraPoint technology was specifically designed to meet the midrange requirement for increased reliability, given the new capacity requirements and amount of data that customers are maintaining online, said Tom Joyce vice president of storage platform marketing at EMC.

"The game has changed significantly over the last couple of years with the availability of higher capacity ATA disks and that has really led customers to implementing entirely new applications that keep a lot more data online longer," said Joyce. "Backup to disk and information lifecycle management are ways that people are leveraging these new lower-cost, higher-capacity disk technologies. The bottom line is in the mid-range we have to get data online and we have larger capacity environments and people using them in more ways than they traditionally have and that's led us to believe we needed more reliability than we were able to deliver before."

Hewlett-Packard's new Enterprise Virtual Arrays have gained strong customer acceptance since their arrival in May and within one quarter the new EVA models account for 50 percent of HP's mid-range shipments, according to Kyle Fitze, director of SAN marketing for HP StorageWorks.

The recent activity in the mid-range, he said, is based on shorter product transition cycles as a result of increased market competition. The net effect, he said is more high-end functionality being migrated into midrange products.

"Increasingly we're seeing capabilities that used to be reserved for high-end data center arrays appear in the mid range," said Fitze. As an example, Fitze points to the advanced DR functionality that the EVA products introduced to the midrange market, including an extended cluster solution that allows customers to replicate a data center and automatically failover the data, the applications and the users to a remote site transparently.

"That kind of advanced data protection and business continuity capability is an example of something that used to be available only on the high end and is now available in the mid range," said Fitze. "There are plenty of other examples, such as local and remote replication. There's a litany of these more advanced capabilities in the mid range and what that does too is drive acceptance by our customers of this category of product. Increasingly they're finding that the applications and their data perhaps don't require all the robustness and complexity of a higher-end array and can be satisfied with a mid-range array. I think that's reflected if you take look at the splits in the growth of data center arrays versus mid range arrays."

Another key piece of the new HP EVA product line is simplicity, enabling mid-range customers that lack extensive internal IT resources to maximize their storage investment by reducing the storage management overhead.

"EVA customers are typically looking for TCO and we think it delivers superior TCO to any of the other mid-range arrays," said Fitze. "The amount of automation and virtualization we have built into the array allows administrators to grow their environments from a few disks up to 240 disk drives without disruption and with a few mouse clicks. It's built around delivering simplicity and that tends to be more important to the mid-range than it is in the high-end environment data center arrays."

The ability to easily deploy multiple tiers of storage is another necessity for the midrange market, said Fitze. "Customers are starting to use these different types of technologies to reflect their realization that not all data is born with the same need for availability and performance. You factor into that low-cost drive technologies like SATA and you can even see tiers within the tiers of storage. It really gives customers flexibility to map technology to the needs of their data and application."

While their new products are architected and priced for the mid-range market--specifically without the massive scalability and ultra high-availability features of high-end data center arrays, Yoshida and Joyce agreed that customers are still spending too much on storage are looking for better ways to control storage costs. Deploying modular storage is one solution, said Yoshida, and the one that Hitachi employed with its new mid-range products.

"Now that we have the ability to do tiering outside of the box and not have everything bundled into one monolithic array, customers are beginning to see that they can lower their cost, and put things that really need tier 1 functionality onto tier 1 storage, but by using external-attached tier 2 they can still have the option of movement into tier 1 when they need it. That's why we went through this approach. So they can have the choice of placing the data where it needs to be, when it needs to be there and then moving it off to lower-cost storage."

"I think to a greater and greater extent in the mid-range, as well as other parts of the business, price has become a major factor," said Joyce. "One of the things that we've learned how to do over the course of the last decade or so is not only lead with features and functionality but also be extremely price competitive.

"We see growth of data of 60 percent plus per year on average in most of the customers we're dealing with, but we don't see budget growth of 60 percent plus per year. So ease of use is important and pure price is important too."

HP's Fitze said that while price is an important factor, it is not a primary buying consideration for mid-range customers. Rather, he said, mid-range pricing issues are more competition-driven.

"There was a time back several years ago that StorageWorks was the only game in town in mid-range arrays and the competition has really heated up the last few years," said Fitze. "With the entrance of EMC and the Clariion products and other companies such as Engenio supplying IBM with a mid-range family of products, what we're seeing is an increase in the advancement of technology in mid-range arrays.

"The length of the product lifecycle is a better way to put it. You used to see product refreshes every 3 to 4 years. Now you're seeing them every 18 to 24 months and that's a reflection of the inoreased competitiveness in this important part of the marketplace. The entry and mid- range segments of the array business is actually the fastest-growing area in terms of units volumes and revenue, so it's a very strategic competitor for all of us."

Giving customers the ability to place data on the most appropriate tier of storage based on its business value is critical to bringing storage costs under control, said Yoshida. "Gartner used to say that management is three to five times the cost of the hardware. I'm seeing customers now who are telling me that their hardware is three to fives times the cost of their management. If you think about it, their budgets have been flat, so they haven't been hiring people but at the same time their storage has been growing at 100 percent. So it's not to say that they more efficient at managing, it says more that they're growing out of control.

"The other thing they're saying is that the high end has been buying 70 percent tier 1 storage because they need high availability. But if they take the TagmaStore approach, they can flip that so that only 20 percent is high-end and the other 70 or 80 percent is tier 2. So now instead of buying majority tier 1, they're buying a majority tier 2, as long as they have the USP in front for the higher-end functionality when and where they need it."

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