A Question Of SANs

hen storage giant EMC, known for its million-dollar storage arrays, introduced its first sub-$6,000 array to the channel late last month, it was only the latest sign that the storage industry is taking the small-business SAN market seriously.

Several tier-one to tier-three vendors have been pushing hard in the past year or so with either SAN product bundles or point products to address the needs of small businesses with big storage requirements.

However, while these vendors and their channel partners find the small-business SAN market tempting, they say it will be some time before it develops into a major channel focus.

Solution providers said that for small businesses looking at a SAN, the first decision to be made is whether they need a SAN at all, or whether direct-attach or NAS is suitable.

The second question is whether to use Fibre Channel, which offers the fastest performance, or iSCSI, which is slower but easier to implement because it is based on common IP networks.

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The final question becomes whether to use a bundled set of SAN components certified to work together by the vendor, or a solution comprised of components selected by the solution provider and the customer.

Right now, small businesses are still much more open to NAS environments than they are to SANs, said Brad Wenzel, president and CEO of Wenzel Data, a Stillwater, Minn.-based solution provider.

“We walk into a small company and say, ‘Why are we meeting?’ ” Wenzel said. “Is anyone complaining about performance? No. Maybe they just want to consolidate storage, and NAS can do it.”

However, Wenzel said, certain types of small businesses, such as high-end prepress graphics and audio/video service providers, do a lot of high-end data processing, and therefore, need SANs.

At this point, he said, the next question is, should it be Fibre Channel or will iSCSI work? “Most people don’t need the SAN for performance,” Wenzel said. “They need it for managing data. So if someone doesn’t need stuff moving at 280 Mbytes per second, iSCSI is good enough.”

Steve Bishop, national account executive at Wenzel Data, said the company does deploy iSCSI SANs, but there are always limitations with networking and scalability. Meanwhile, he said, the price of Fibre Channel continues to drop.

“An iSCSI SAN is like having a great price on a baseball ticket, but when you get to the ball game, you have an obstructed view,” Bishop said. “So we will see a resurgence of the Fibre Channel SAN.”

John Thome, vice president of Chi, a Warrensville Heights, Ohio-based solution provider, said there are a lot of small businesses that have enough servers trying to access common data that a SAN might be appropriate. Such customers could use iSCSI or iSCSI combined with Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 NAS operating system, or Fibre Channel, depending on their applications and computer environments, he said.

Thome said iSCSI is not suitable for every company. “If you have a SQL server with four people hitting it, iSCSI is OK,” he said. “If 40 people are hitting it, no.”

But as the performance needs of small businesses increasingly exceed the capabilities of iSCSI, the cost of Fibre Channel is dropping dramatically, Thome said. For example, he cited a QLogic 16-port Fibre Channel switch priced under $10,000, and an eight-port switch for less than $3,500. “It brings Fibre Channel capabilities down to the small business,” he said.

Ask Doug Marlin when a SAN is appropriate for a small business and he’ll answer “never.” A managing partner at Independent Technology Group, a La Canada, Calif.-based solution provider, Marlin adds: “If you ask me that question in 90 days, I may have a different answer for you.”

Marlin this month plans to start training with some vendors to build SANs for small businesses. “If it’s a small company selling widgets, they don’t need a SAN,” he said. “But a company like an insurance broker, which runs their business on a computer, they need a SAN.”

Storage vendors see gold in the small-business market and have recently come out with bundles and components for entry-level SANs.

QLogic has been working on the small-business SAN market for at least two years and is only now finding it a viable market, said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing at the company.

“There are two things we had to do to tackle this market,” Berry said. “First, we had to cost-reduce the hardware, which we could do because we already had a single-chip Fibre Channel solution. Second, we had to make management less complex: Instead of a command line interface with 16-digit worldwide name numbers, we have added a wizard.”

QLogic in April introduced the SAN Connectivity Kit 3000, which includes an eight-port stackable Fibre Channel switch, four host bus adapters, cables, and management and driver software for Solaris, Linux, NetWare and Windows. The bundle lists for $6,999. Last month, QLogic followed with the SAN Connectivity Kit for Windows Server 2003, which has the same hardware but drivers only for the Windows operating system. It lists for $5,999.

IBM offers a number of pre-integrated SAN bundles for companies with fewer than 100 employees that have complex environments requiring applications that are available 24x7, said Jeff Barnett, manager of strategy for IBM’s storage software. Most small businesses are not able to set up their own SANs, so they depend on solution providers for help, Barnett said. “But VARs say they can’t have an offering for every customer. So we have preconfigured, precabled bundles,” he said.

IBM has a variety of individually SKU’d SAN bundles, including some based on its new FAStT 100 SATA-based array. The company also sells components to solution providers that build their own small-business SANs.

Hewlett-Packard’s SAN bundles are aimed at taking the complexity out of SANs for smaller businesses, said Rich Bruklis, product marketing manager for the vendor. “We tried to give customers the A+B=C mentality,” he said. “We want to make [a SAN] a good experience right off the bat.”

HP has taken its SAN bundles a step further by including its ProLiant servers in the packages. One bundle comes with two ProLiant DL380 servers, an MSA500 storage controller, two host bus adapters and cables, with a list price of $9,999. A similar bundle replaces the MSA500 with an MSA1000 and adds an eight-port Fibre Channel switch, for $19,999.

The company offers bundles without the server based on the MSA family of entry-level arrays. These include all the software and hardware for direct-attach SCSI or entry-level SAN environments.

Even at those prices, SANs for small businesses can be costly for such companies, Bruklis said. “If you look at a host bus adapter price today, it’s over $1,000,” he said. “This can be prohibitive to small customers who only pay $1,500 for the server. If we can get the price to $500 or less, it can be the catalyst to adoption in the SMB market. We expect that to happen in the next 90 days or less.”

It could happen sooner. Emulex late last month introduced the LP101, a low-cost host bus adapter for small and midsize SANs. The LP101 will first be available in OEM SAN bundles, but will come to the channel in the near future with a street price of less than $500, said Mike Kane, senior director of product management at Emulex.

The cost of the LP101 was kept in check by including software to provide point-and-click installation and basic management, as well as limiting the adapter’s fabric connectivity to small SANs, Kane said.

Solution providers said bundled “SAN-in-a-can” offerings in general are too limited in application, and that they instead prefer to build small-business SANs using best-of-breed components.

It is difficult to use SAN bundles because each customer has its own storage environment, said Richard Eng, director of sales at Integrix, a Newbury Park, Calif.-based solution provider. “When we go out, we don’t have a specific bundle, except maybe for an entry-level SAN with virtualization,” Eng said. “Instead, we interview the customers, understand their needs, and then develop proposals for those needs, like backup and restore.”

The typical small business needs 1 Tbyte or 2 Tbytes of capacity, which Integrix, using arrays from iQstore, also of Newbury Park, can configure into SANs costing less than $10,000 using SATA drives or less than $20,000 using Fibre Channel drives.

'Wenzel said his company also prefers to develop its own bundle, which it did using Windows Storage Server 2003, FalconStor’s IPStor software, and a 4-Tbyte array with a 4-Gbyte solid-state disk as a cache from Dynamic Network Factory. The bundle can be had for about $25,000.

With falling prices and growing storage needs, small businesses may indeed embrace SANs. Whether those SANs will be Fibre Channel or iSCSI, bundled or not, are questions the market will answer over time.