Storage Resellers Profit From Customization Options

No longer is it necessary to settle for an industry-standard motherboard inside a nondescript chassis running Microsoft Windows or some Linux operating system to manage a few hard drives.

Instead, vendors and custom-system builders are serving customers and solution providers a growing range of hardware and software options.

One of the biggest changes, custom storage system builders said, is in the increasing need for high-performance storage servers.

Those storage systems are increasingly built for high-end applications such as video, said Joe Swanson, president of Rorke Data Inc., an Eden Prairie, Minn.-based custom-system and storage builder.

It is a market where performance for tasks such as video storage, broadcasting, editing and surveillance is measured in terms of bandwidth, not IOs per second, Swanson said. Rorke Data customizes the entire system including the chassis, CPU, memory, cooling, types of controllers and which hard drives to use.

"Customers are looking for a lot of cost-effective storage now that prices have dropped," Swanson said.

For some applications, custom storage arrays is the only way to go, said Stephen Monteros, COO of Linear Systems, a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based integrator of image management systems for police departments.

"Name-brand vendors' storage products are designed to work in certain environments," Monteros said. "In police departments, they're often not kept in those environments. And custom systems are more flexible."

Linear Systems' storage arrays are built by a third-party custom-system builder to very strict requirements, Monteros said. For instance, he said his company looks closely at the quality and the mean time before failure rating of the chassis' fans, as the arrays are typically kept in a rack sitting in an evidence room instead of in a climate-controlled data center.

Also, Monteros said, he knows the capacity requirements will double in the near future, and so his company carefully scrutinizes the storage controllers. "We throw questions to vendors like, 'How do you upgrade the firmware? How do you upgrade capacity? Do you have a schema for doubling the number of ports quickly? ' " he said.

Other custom-system builders, including Burnsville, Minn.-based Nor-Tech and Fremont, Calif.-based Amax Information Technologies, are focusing on high-end products such as clustered storage solutions.

Todd Swank, vice president of marketing at Nor-Tech, said that demand for custom storage in general is growing fast. For high-end storage devices for use in clustered environments, it might take two to three months from the time the company decides to build a solution to the time it is ready.

"We want to look at what applications customers will integrate with our storage, and what features we need to offer," Swank said. "We don't have the size and marketing dollars to compete against companies like EMC."

The bulk of custom storage sales for those builders, however, comprise more industry-standard products.

Nor-Tech recently released its new Voyageur Storage Server line, which it customizes to meet the requirements of other solution providers. The Voyageurs come in a 2U chassis with room for eight SATA drives and a 500-watt power supply, and a 3U chassis with room for up to 16 SAS or SATA drives and a 650-watt power supply. Both use Intel quad-core Xeon processors and a custom-built NAS or iSCSI operating system, and come with a three-year warranty, Swank said.

"As a company, we have to have a base offering," he said. "Each customer has specific requirements. But it's still nice to point to a base product. We tell customers, 'Here's what we have, what do you want that's different?' We're not rigid in our product offerings."

Next: Customization Options

Customization options include size of hard drive to 1 Tbyte, choice of processor, the opportunity to substitute Windows Storage Server as the operating system, and configuration as an iSCSI appliance, a NAS appliance, or both.

Amax offers its customers, including end users and other custom system builders, a choice of chassis, including the Modular Server from Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif. and a standard chassis from Super Micro Computer Inc., San Jose, Calif.

James Huang, product marketing manager at Amax, said the Intel chassis offers flexibility, including the ability to operate as both a server and a storage array simultaneously, while the Super Micro chassis has a lower price and is more widely available.

Amax also offers a choice of operating systems, including DSS and DSS Lite from Open-E, Puchheim, Germany, and Windows Storage Server or Windows Unified Server from Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash.

Swanson said that a big driver in the custom storage market is the cost of storage. Companies such as EMC Corp. sell storage for up to $5 per Gbyte, while smaller builders such as Rorke Data sell it for less than $3 per Gbyte.

"Falling prices is the biggest driver going forward," he said. "Customers are seeing an explosion in storage requirements. But they can't spend $4 [per Gbyte] to $5 per Gbyte for video surveillance. They need $1 per Gbyte. Then there's Medicare dropping how much it pays in reimbursements for medical images, so customers are looking for more ways to cut the cost of storing images."

Suppliers to the custom storage industry are continually increasing the choices available to system builders.

Sun Microsystems Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., for instance, in late April started making its OpenSolaris operating system available free of charge to developers and integrators who can download it onto industry-standard x86-based servers. Sun joins a number of other vendors that help turn white-box servers into white-box storage devices.

Open-E, for instance, offers software on a USB device that can boot a server up into an iSCSI, a NAS, or a combination appliance.

The company, with a U.S.-based staff that has grown from two people in November to 12 people today, is adding a number of features to its DSS operating system, said Krzysztof Franek, president and CEO.

Among the new additions to its storage operating system are failover for iSCSI storage, WORM capability and NDMP compatibility.

The iSCSI failover feature lets two custom storage appliances be configured in an active-passive configuration in that one device is in production while its data is mirrored to the second device, Franek said.

The WORM (write-once, read many) feature comes from demands by customers affected by government regulations that certain types of data must be stored in a format that can be read and accessed but cannot be altered or deleted, Franek said.

With the addition of NDMP, or network data management protocol, capabilities, storage appliances based on the Open-E software can work with a wider range of storage devices for data backup and recovery, Franek said.

Going forward, Open-E plans to add NAS failover to its software. Also slated is active-active failover, which is the first step toward clustered storage, Franek said. Both features are expected to be available soon, he said.

Wasabi Systems Inc., Norfolk, Va., which also offers software to turn industry- standard servers into storage appliances, recently started offering its own VMX-branded line of storage arrays to solution providers that would rather sell a low-cost branded system, said James Rakovan, director of channels and sales.

However, the company is still developing its Storage Builder software for system builders comfortable with building their own appliances, said Jon France, inside sales manager.

Wasabi, which in April released a version of Storage Builder that can work with 10-Gbit Ethernet cards to replace multiple Gbit Ethernet cards, in August will revamp the software with new features including data snapshots, replication and thin provisioning, France said.

The company has resisted offering software to build combination iSCSI and NAS appliances because of the processing overhead involved, but may offer such an option by year-end, he said.

Intel offers three chassis to custom- storage builders, said David Brown, marketing director of the company's Enterprise Platform and Services Division and general manager of channel server products.

The first, the SSR212MC2, also known as McKay Creek, is a 2U chassis with space for up to 12 2.5-inch SATA drives. It can be used for SAN, NAS and direct-attach environments, including 10-Gbit Ethernet networks.

The second, Helena Island, is a small-office and home-office chassis with space for up to 2 TB of storage. It ships with software from EMC that is validated for use with Microsoft's Home Server operating system.

The third is the Intel Modular Server for small businesses that includes up to six two-way compute nodes and up to 14 2.5-inch hard SAS drives. Each compute node connects to two SAS controllers, making it possible to set up an entire SAN within the chassis. Intel plans to shortly add the capability of doing failover within the chassis, and is considering allowing failover between multiple chassis for disaster recovery, Brown said.