SAN And NAS Enable The E-conomy.

The Web economy is driving fundamental change across the entire business landscape. Organizations are increasingly leveraging Internet service models to support internal and external customer requirements--and these customers are demanding instantaneous, accurate service. Any decision to compromise on speed or accuracy is a decision that will put a business out of business.

By definition, e-business must be open for global business across multiple time zones. Bank customers want access to their accounts on a 24x7 basis. Auction sites operate around the clock. Further, with global availability and intensive pressure on marketing-driven growth, transaction levels can spike capriciously and inadequate storage management can drive major performance bottlenecks for Web applications. One successful advertising campaign or one hit Super Bowl commercial can jam web site traffic off the gauge. In this environment, the days of monolithic storage solutions are numbered. Organizations require agile, scalable, and affordable approaches that can support the often-unpredictable transaction volumes. Consumer-driven 24x7 availability requirements mean that it is no longer acceptable to take systems offline to execute important data management tasks. Further, even minor storage failures can be very costly to an organization and harm consumer confidence.

In too many circumstances, the requirement for speed runs counter to the requirement for accuracy. While customers want immediate access to their bank records, a storage crash that drives failure to log even a single transaction translates into expensive customer service calls, erosion of the customer/revenue base, and collateral damage to your brand. As the sheer volume of Web and Internet content increases exponentially, the players in the Internet economy are demanding that storage solutions track beyond linear advance. These new market realities leave Internet, Application Service Providers (ASPs), and traditional brick-and-mortar organizations scrambling for reliable and scalable storage solutions. Under the old world approach, this would have driven expensive growth in organizations' requirement for server storage to support additional applications, operating system, database, and Web storefronts.

In the context of this environment, we are witnessing a huge increase in interest in emerging Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution offerings. In fact, International Data Corporation projects that the NAS market will hit $6.5 billion by 2003. These numbers are eclipsed even by analyst projections that peg the worldwide demand for SAN solutions at more than $15 billion by 2002. The industry notes that, as applications get larger and more demanding, NAS and SAN solutions will become increasingly mission critical. In this environment, organizations are increasingly likely to bring hardware and software from vendors specializing in enterprise storage, interfacing traditional servers with midrange computers and even mainframe machines.

SAN And NAS--Affordable, Scalable, Efficient

NAS appliances and SAN architectures are emerging as the solutions of choice to meet the Internet economy's storage requirements for a series of reasons--reliability, scalability, and cost/performance. While there is burgeoning interest in the NAS/SAN partnership, there is also significant confusion about the functionality that the technologies deliver and how they fit in the marketplace. Fundamentally, both technologies deliver increased storage capacity and performance while allowing organizations to sidestep the cost and complexity associated with scaling expensive server infrastructure in line with requirements for network storage.

Although SAN and NAS deliver enhanced storage capacity and performance, they are different technologies and attach to the network at different points. NAS is a defined "product" that sits between the application server and the file system. In contrast, SAN is a defined "architecture" that sits between the file system and the point of physical storage. As such, a SAN is a separate network that connects storage and servers.

Capable of being connected anywhere on the network, a NAS device is essentially a stripped-down server specifically designed for file services such as sending, receiving, and storing data. NAS devices are particularly well suited to workgroups with need for additional storage. These standalone devices run their own integrated hardware and software, and typically support discreet storage requirements without requiring the overhead associated with installing a new server.

SAN solves the LAN-to-storage bottleneck by using a Fibre Channel to take storage off of the server entirely. Storage is centralized so that individual servers can access and tap hard drives as needed--which translates into more efficient use of storage space and much higher scalability. Where NAS is a discreet approach, deployed to support a workgroup, SAN is an enterprise solution that stores data that can be accessed by multiple clients and servers.

Both approaches allow the sharing of storage with a number of hosts and support a variety of operating systems concurrently. It is important to note that these are not mutually exclusive solutions and, as organizations become ever more network dependent, increasing numbers of organizations will deploy integrated NAS/SAN approaches to provide more robust reliability and scalability.

Looking more closely at cost savings that these solutions bring to the table, the economies lie in SAN/NAS capability to reduce the requirement for organizations to increase their investment in expensive server technologies in direct proportion to the requirement for the increase in the requirement for capacity.

Perhaps most importantly, the solutions reduce the complexity of configuration and management--a critical consideration in the face of today's increasingly acute IT labor shortage. Network administrators can install and configure NAS and SAN solutions via a graphical user interface, thus simplifying server administration and driving down installation and administration errors and increasing total uptime. Importantly, SAN and NAS administrators are able to manage greater data capacity than under standard server-based approaches.

ASPs--Storage Aggregators

The sweetheart of today's IT marketplace, ASPs are being hailed as the solution providers for the e-Economy. While, to date, the media focus on the ASP value proposition has concentrated most heavily on application outsourcing derived from their service-based, hosted business model, it seems logical that organizations will look to ASPs for total solutions--and that real-time storage capabilities will be an increasingly critical part of platform hosting solutions. As such, ASPs are assuming an increasingly important role as capacity aggregators. Many organizations are looking to shed the overhead associated with maintaining an in-house MIS function and merely rent access to applications, hardware, and storage on a Just-in-Time basis. During peak requirements, the organization may run across a whole server center and leverage huge volumes of short-term data storage. However, as requirements are reduced seasonally or during slow points in the week or day, there is no reason for the organization to spend the mone y to maintain its own 24x7 capability.

ASPs are also poised to assume a major role as providers of data warehousing capabilities for hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Decision Support applications. Accessible via the Web and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), this storage-intensive infrastructure expansion is projected to drive increased demand for SAN solutions. The bottom line is that, whether organizations elect to go with ASPs to service their IT application and infrastructure requirements or maintain the capability in-house, SAN and NAS solutions are integral enabling technologies.

Data Management Strategy- Blocking And Tackling

Significant synergy exists between SAN and NAS and traditional RAID and tape backup technologies to enable greater depth in data management, but one will not be a suitable substitute for the other. While new storage approaches, like SAN and NAS, are definitely the wave of the future, organizations cannot afford to lose sight of the fundamental requirement to implement a disciplined data management strategy. As we push into the new era of e-computing where 100 percent reliability is a business requirement, organizations need to leverage new technologies within a big-picture strategic approach that ensures bulletproof performance.

Shaf Mohebbi is the executive vice president of sales and marketing at Bitco Enterprises (Ashburn, VA).