NAS virtualization ready to double in 2006: NAS and NAS virtualization survey results.

A survey conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. and Coughlin Associates targeted IT operations having at least one NAS system, and a minimum of one terabyte (TB) of raw disk storage. Out of 15,000 managers contacted, over 2,000 qualified respondents answered a "screening survey." A "selected population" of 135 IT administrators or managers answered the full survey.

The 2,111 IT Screener Survey sites totaled 679 petabytes of disk storage and 4,690 NAS systems. 66% of the sites have over 25TB of total disk capacity as compared to 50% found in our 2004 survey, and 40% in our 2003 survey. Half of the 2,111 IT sites have at least one NAS.

Figure 1 shows the selected population sorted by total raw disk drive capacity. Among this selected survey population, sites with over 10 NAS systems represent 25% of the population compared to 20% in our 2004 survey and 15% found in our 2003 survey. About 33% of the population has over 30% of its disk capacity in a NAS configuration, as compared to 25% in 2004 and 16% in 2003.

Management Challenges and NAS Market Trends

Data protection and coping with growing storage capacity are at the top of the storage management challenges. More than half of the surveyed sites suffer from performance bottlenecks, reflecting the increased complexity of the storage environment, and the need for additional management tools.

Only 3 years ago, to the question "What made you choose SAN instead of NAS?" 41% said performance, 20 % said scalability, 30% were unfamiliar with NAS, and the remaining 9% said they wanted to keep the same hardware as their server vendor and that vendor did not offer a NAS product. Today, every major storage vendor offers several NAS products and large sites rank performance highest among the preferred features of a NAS.

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NAS Virtualization

As a key enabler of storage consolidation, NAS virtualization has emerged in a very few years from the research stage to being a key feature in NAS offerings. NAS virtualization products create a single logical view across the file systems of multiple NAS's and are able to non-disruptively migrate data from one storage system to another. This is essential for efficient capacity utilization and sustained performance.

"NAS virtualization allows a single logical view across multiple NAS in a facility making scaling, performance, and management of expanding NAS networks possible," says Tom Coughlin, president and principal analyst of Coughlin Associates. "NAS virtualization is one of the major technological advances of the past five years. The survey shows an enormous interest in virtualization, what customers want and don't want in a NAS virtualization solution and a great awareness of the benefits of newer NAS virtualization offerings."

16% of the 2,111 sites and 42% of the selected population use some kind of NAS virtualization today.

Figure 2 shows the number of installed virtualization engines sorted by industry. The Telecom industry is the larger user of virtualization, while manufacturing and government agencies use it the least.

Figure 3 shows that two thirds of the population that uses virtualization today will upgrade it next year, and an additional 13% will install it for the first time, leaving at most 45% of the surveyed population without virtualization by 2007. This represents a considerable amount of virtualization products planned to be purchased in the next 18 months, and shows a very rapid acceptance growth in demand for a feature that was hardly talked about three years ago.

Figure 4 shows that generally virtualization and aggregation of NAS is more likely as the number of NAS systems increases.

In additional results, users cite performance as the major benefit NAS virtualization brings to management of storage while scalability and ease of deployment are at the top of the selection criteria when acquiring a virtualization product. No single point of failure is found to be the major concern when acquiring a virtualization product.

Over 73% of the full survey participants want to leverage existing backup and recovery procedures. 69% need a NAS virtualization solution that does not require remounting of clients. 79% found NAS virtualization ease-of-deployment to be important while 46% see this as very or extremely important.

We tested the respondents on their awareness of smaller virtualization vendors with two questions. The first one was asked to the 2,111 population (screening survey), "Which of these vendors are familiar to you?" naming a few of the prominent new entrants to virtualization vendors. Exanet came out as the most familiar vendor. The full survey population was asked which of the named vendors was their top choice for the acquisition of a new virtualization product. EMC came out on top. As expected, the market acceptance of smaller vendors is higher in small and medium size sites while brand recognition is important in customers' final decisions.

Conclusions

NAS growth has outpaced most predictions. All major storage vendors offer a number of NAS system models, and a number of smaller new companies compete for a portion of this multibillion dollar market. Sites with over five NAS systems represent over 30% of the population with NAS. Managing this high number of discrete file systems, including additions, changes and migrations, has proven to be an impossible task without NAS virtualization. As a result, NAS virtualization installations are set to double in 2006.

The survey results are sorted by capacity tiers, revenues and industries. Nine industries were targeted in this report.

Farid Neema is president of Peripheral Concepts and Tom Coughlin is president of Coughlin Associates.

www.periconcepts.com

www.tomcoughlin.com

Full Survey, Raw Disk Storage Tiers

1-10 TB      19%
11-50 TB     27%
51-200 TB    25%
200 TB-1 PB  15%
>1 PB        14%

Figure 1.

Note: Table made from pie chart.

Full Survey, Do you use a NAS virtualization/aggregation solution or do
you plan to acquire or upgrade the one you have?

Today                  14%
Today and Will Update
Plan                   13%
Don't Know             16%
No and No Plan         29%

Figure 3.

Note: Table made from pie chart.