Gartner+Critical+Capabilities

Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays

20 November 2014 ID:G00263130

Analyst(s): Valdis Filks, Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox

VIEW SUMMARY

Overview

Key Findings

With the inclusion of solid-state drives in arrays, performance is no longer a differentiator in its

own right, but a scalability enabler that improves operational and financial efficiency by facilitating

storage consolidation.

Product differentiation is created primarily by differences in architecture, software functionality,

data flow, support and microcode quality, rather than components and packaging.

Clustered, scale-out, and federated storage architectures and products can achieve levels of scale,

performance, reliability, serviceability and availability comparable to traditional, scale-up high-end

arrays.

The feature sets of high-end storage arrays adapt slowly, and the older systems are incapable of

offering data reduction, virtualization and unified protocol support.

Recommendations

Move beyond technical attributes to include vendor service and support capabilities, as well as

acquisition and ownership costs, when making your high-end storage array buying decisions.

Don't always use the ingrained, dominant considerations of incumbency, vendor and product

reputations when choosing high-end storage solutions.

Vary the ratios of SSDs, Serial Attached SCSI and SATA hard-disk drives in the storage array, and

limit maximum configurations based on system performance to ensure that SLAs are met during

the planned service life of the system.

Select disk arrays based on the weighting and criteria created by your IT department to meet your

organizational or business objectives, rather than choosing those with the most features or

highest overall scores.

What You Need to Know

Superior nondisruptive serviceability and data protection characterize high-end arrays. They are the

visible metrics that differentiate high-end array models from other arrays, although the gap is closing.

The software architectures used in many high-end storage arrays can trace their lineage back 20 years

or more.

Although this maturity delivers high availability and broad ecosystem support, it is also becoming a

hindrance with respect to flexibility, adaptability and delays to the introduction of new features,

compared with newer designs. Administrative and management interfaces are often more complicated

when using arrays involving older software designs, no matter how much the internal structures are

hidden or abstracted. The ability of older systems to provide unified storage protocols, data reduction

and detailed performance instrumentation is also limited, because the original software was not

designed with these capabilities as design objectives.

Gartner expects that, within the next four years, arrays using legacy software will need major re-

engineering to remain competitive against newer systems that achieve high-end status, as well as

hybrid storage solutions that use solid-state technologies to improve performance, storage efficiency

and availability. In this research, the aggregated scores among the arrays are minimal. Therefore,

clients are advised to look at the individual capabilities that are important to them, rather than the

overall score.

Because array differentiation has decreased, the real challenge of performing a successful storage

infrastructure upgrade is not designing an infrastructure upgrade that works, but designing one that

optimizes agility and minimizes total cost of ownership (TCO). Another practical consideration is that

choosing a suboptimal solution is likely to have only a moderate impact on deployment and TCO for the

following reasons:

Product advantages are usually short-lived and temporary. Gartner refers to this phenomenon as

the "compression of product differentiation."

Most clients report that differences in management and monitoring tools, as well as ecosystem

support among various vendors' offerings, are not enough to change staffing requirements.

Storage TCO, although growing, still accounts for less than 10% (6.5% in 2013) of most IT

budgets.

NOTE 1

Z/OS SUPPORT

This research compares storage arrays that support

z/OS mainframe environments with arrays that do not.

This difference in the presence or absence of z/OS

support is taken into account only in the array

ecosystem ratings, where it contributes positively to

arrays supporting z/OS, and has no influence on arrays

not supporting z/OS. It has no influence on other

ratings or the rating weights used in the tool.

CRITICAL CAPABILITIES METHODOLOGY

This methodology requires analysts to identify the

critical capabilities for a class of products or services.

Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative

importance for specific product or service use cases.

Next, products/services are rated in terms of how well

they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A score

that summarizes how well they meet the critical

capabilities for each use case is then calculated for

each product/service.

"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate

products/services in a class in terms of their quality

and performance. Gartner recommends that users

consider the set of critical capabilities as some of the

most important criteria for acquisition decisions.

In defining the product/service category for evaluation,

the analyst first identifies the leading uses for the

products/services in this market. What needs are end-

users looking to fulfill, when considering

products/services in this market? Use cases should

match common client deployment scenarios. These

distinct client scenarios define the Use Cases.

The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities.

These capabilities are generalized groups of features

commonly required by this class of products/services.

Each capability is assigned a level of importance in

fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features are

more important than others, depending on the use

case being evaluated.

Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms

of how well it delivers each capability, on a five-point

scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all

vendors, allowing easy comparisons between the

different sets of features.

Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:

1 = Poor: most or all defined requirements not

achieved

2 = Fair: some requirements not achieved

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements

5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements

To determine an overall score for each product in the

use cases, the product ratings are multiplied by the

weightings to come up with the product score in use

cases.

The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not

represent all capabilities for any product; therefore,

may not represent those most important for a specific

use situation or business objective. Clients should use

a critical capabilities analysis as one of several sources

of input about a product before making a

product/service decision.

Page 1 of 12Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays

10/1/2015http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1RO1Z8Z&ct=140310&st=sb

Analysis

Introduction

The arrays evaluated in this research include scale-up, scale-out, hybrid and unified storage

architectures. Because these arrays have different availability characteristics, performance profiles,

scalability, ecosystem support, pricing and warranties, they enable users to tailor solutions against

operational needs, planned new application deployments, and forecast growth rates and asset

management strategies.

Midrange arrays with scale-out characteristics can satisfy the high-availability criteria when configured

with four or more controllers and multiple disk shelves. Whether these differences in availability are

enough to affect infrastructure design and operational procedures will vary by user environment, and

will also be influenced by other considerations, such as host system/capacity scaling, downtime costs,

lost opportunity costs and the maturity of the end-user change control procedures (e.g., hardware,

software, procedures and scripting), which directly affect availability.

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

The weighted capabilities scores for all use cases are displayed as components of the overall score (see

Figures 1 through 6).

Figure 1. Vendors' Product Scores for the Overall Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 2. Vendors' Product Scores for the Consolidation Use Case




Figure 3. Vendors' Product Scores for the OLTP Use Case


Figure 4. Vendors' Product Scores for the Server Virtualization and VDI Use Case




Figure 5. Vendors' Product Scores for the Analytics Use Case


Figure 6. Vendors' Product Scores for the Cloud Use Case




Vendors

DataDirect Networks SFA12K

The SFA12KX, the newest member of the SFA12K family, increases SFA12K performance/throughput

via a hardware refresh and through software improvements. Like other members of the SFA12K family,

it remains a dual-controller array that, with the exception of an in-storage processing capability,

prioritizes scalability, performance/throughput and availability over value-added functionality, such as

local and remote replication, thin provisioning and autotiering. These priorities align better with the

needs of the high-end, high-performance computing (HPC) market than with general-purpose IT

environments. Further enhancing the appeal of the SFA12KX in large environments is dense packaging:

84 HDDs/4U or 5 PB/rack, and GridScaler and ExaScaler gateways that support parallel file systems,

based on IBM's GPFS or the open-source Lustre parallel file system.

The combination of high bandwidth and high areal densities has made the SFA12K a popular array in

the HPC, cloud, surveillance and media markets that prioritize automatic block alignment and

bandwidth over input/output operations per second (IOPS). The SFA12K's high areal density also makes

it an attractive repository for big data and inactive data, particularly as a backup target for backup

solutions doing their own compression and/or deduplication. Offsetting these strengths are limited

ecosystem support beyond parallel file systems and backup/restore products; lack of vSphere API for

Array Integration (VAAI) support, which limits its appeal for use as VMware storage; zero bit detection,

which limits its appeal with applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Database; and quality of

service (QoS) and security features that could limit its appeal in multitenancy environments.

EMC VMAX

The maturity of the VMAX 10K, 20K and 40K hardware, combined with the Enginuity software and wide

ecosystem support, provides proven reliability and stability. However, the need for backward

compatibility has complicated the development of new functions, such as data reduction. The VMAX3,

which has recently become generally available, has not yet had time to be market-validated, because it

only became available on 26 September 2014. Even with new controllers, promised Hypermax software

updates and a new InfiniBand internal interconnect, mainframe support is not available, nor is the little-

used Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. Nevertheless, with new functions, such as in-built

VPLEX, recover point replication, virtual thin provisioning and more processing power, customers should

move quickly to the VMAX3, because it has the potential to develop further.

The new VMAX 100K, 200K and 400K arrays still lack independent benchmark results, which, in some

cases, leads users to delay deploying a new feature into production environments until the feature's

performance has been fully profiled, and its impact on native performance is fully understood. The lack

of independent benchmark results has also led to misunderstandings regarding the configuration of

back-end SSDs and HDDs into redundant array of independent disks (RAID) groups, which have

required users to add capacity to enable the use of more-expensive 3D+1P RAID groups to achieve

needed performance levels, rather than larger, more-economical 7D+1P RAID groups.

EMC's expansion into software-defined storage (SDS; aka ViPR), network-based replication (aka

RecoverPoint) and network-based virtualization (aka VPLEX) suggests that new VMAX users should

evaluate the use of these products, in addition to VMAX-based features, when creating their storage

infrastructure and operational visions.

Fujitsu Eternus DX8700 S2

The DX8700 S2 series is a mature, high-end array with a reputation for robust engineering and

reliability, with redundant RAID groups spanning enclosures and redundant controller failover features.

Within the high-end segment, Fujitsu offers simple unlimited software licensing on a per-controller



basis; therefore, customers do not need to spend more as they increase the capacity of the arrays. The

DX8700 S2 series was updated with a new level of software to improve performance and improved

QoS, which not only manages latency and bandwidth, but also integrates with the DX8700 Automated

Storage Tiering to move data to the required storage tier to meet QoS targets. It is a scale-out array,

providing up to eight controllers.

The DX8700 S2 has offered massive array of idle disks (MAID) or disk spin-down for years. Even

though this feature has been implemented successfully without any reported problems, it has not been

adopted, nor has it gained popular market acceptance. The same Eternus SF management software is

used across the entire DX product line, from the entry level to the high end. This simplifies

manageability, migration and replication among Fujitsu storage arrays. Customer feedback is positive

concerning the performance, reliability, support and serviceability of the DX8700 S2, and Gartner

clients report that the DX8700 S2 RAID rebuild times are faster than comparable systems. The

management interface is geared toward storage experts, but is simplified in the Eternus SF V16,

thereby reducing training costs and improving storage administrator productivity. To enable workflow

integration with SDS platforms, Fujitsu is working closely with the OpenStack project.

HDS HUS VM

The Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) VM is an entry-level version of the

Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) series. Similar to its larger VSP siblings, it is built around Hitachi's cross-

bar switches, has the same functionality as the VSP, can replicate to HUS VM or VSP systems using

TrueCopy or Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR), and uses the same management tools as the VSP.

Because it shares APIs with the VSP, it has the same ecosystem support; however, it does not scale to

the same storage capacity levels as the HDS VSP G1000. Similarly, it does not provide data reduction

features. Hardware reliability and microcode quality are good; this increases the appeal of its Universal

Volume Manager (UVM), which enables the HUS VM to virtualize third-party storage systems.

Hitachi Data Systems offers performance transparency with its arrays, with SPC-1 performance and

throughput benchmark results available. Client feedback indicates that the use of thin provisioning

generally improves performance and that autotiering has little to no impact on array performance.

Snapshots have a measurably negative, but entirely acceptable, impact on performance and

throughput. Offsetting these strengths are the lack of native Internet Small Computer System Interface

(iSCSI) and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support, which is particularly useful for remote replication, as

well as relatively slow integration with server virtualization, database, shareware and backup offerings.

Integration with the Hitachi NAS platform adds iSCSI, Common Internet File System (CIFS) and

Network File System (NFS) protocol support for users that need more than just Fibre Channel support.

HDS VSP G1000

The VSP has built its market appeal on reliability, quality microcode and solid performance, as well as

its ability to virtualize third-party storage systems using UVM. The latest VSP G1000 was launched in

April 2014, with more capacity and performance/throughput achieved via faster controllers and

improved data flows. Configuration flexibility has been improved by a repackaging of hardware that

enables controllers to be packaged in a separate rack. VSP packaging also supports the addition of

capacity-only nodes that can be separated from the controllers. It provides a larger variety of features,

such as a unified storage, heterogeneous storage virtualization and content management via

integration with HCAP. Data compression and reduction are not supported. Performance needs dictate

and independently configure each redundant node's front- and back-end ports, cache, and back-end

capacity. However, accelerated flash can be used to accelerate performance in hybrid configurations.

Additional feature highlights include thin provisioning, autotiering, volume-cloning and space-efficient

snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, and three-site replication topologies.

The VSP asynchronous replication (aka HUR) is built around the concept of journal files stored on disk,

which makes HUR tolerant of communication line failures, allows users to trade off bandwidth

availability against recovery point objectives (RPOs) and reduces the demands placed on cache. It also

offers a data flow that enables the remote VSP to pull writes to protected volumes on the disaster

recovery site, rather than having the production-side VSP push these writes to the disaster recovery

site. Pulling writes, rather than pushing them, reduces the impact of HUR on the VSP systems and

reduces bandwidth requirements, which lowers costs. Offsetting these strengths are the lack of native

iSCSI and 10GbE support, as well as relatively slow integration with server virtualization, database,

shareware and backup offerings.

HP 3PAR StoreServ 10000

The 3PAR StoreServ 10000 is HP's preferred, go-to, high-end storage system for open-system

infrastructures that require the highest levels of performance and resiliency. Scalable from two to eight

controller-nodes, the 3PAR StoreServ 10000 requires a minimum of four controller-nodes to satisfy

Gartner's high-end, general-purpose storage system definition. Competitive with small and midsize,

traditional, frame-based, high-end storage arrays, particularly with regard to storage efficiency features

and ease of use, HP continues to make material R&D investments to enhance 3PAR StoreServ 10000

availability, performance, capacity scalability and security capabilities. Configuring 3PAR StoreServ

storage arrays with four or more nodes limits the effects of high-impact electronics failures to no more

than 25% of the system's performance and throughput. The impact of electronic failures is further

reduced by 3PAR's Persistent Cache and Persistent Port failover features, which enable the caches in

surviving nodes to stay in write-in mode and active host connections to remain online.

Resiliency features include three-site replication topologies, as well as Peer Persistence, which enables

transparent failover and failback between two 3PAR StoreServ 10000 systems located within

metropolitan distances. However, offsetting the benefit of these functions are the relatively long RPOs

that result from 3PAR's asynchronous remote copy actually sending the difference between two snaps

to faraway disaster recovery sites; microcode updates that can be time-consuming, because the time

required is proportional to the number of nodes in the system; and a relatively large footprint caused

by the use of four-disk magazines, instead of more-dense packaging schemes.

HP XP7



Sourced from Hitachi Ltd. under joint technology and OEM agreements, the HP XP7 is the next

incremental evolution of the high-end, frame-based XP-Series that HP has been selling since 1999.

Engineered to be deployed in support of applications that require the highest levels of resiliency and

performance, the HP XP7 features increased capacity scalability and performance over its predecessor,

the HP XP P9500, while leveraging the broad array of proven HP-XP-series data management software.

Beyond expected capacity and performance improvements, the new Active-Active High Availability and

Active-Active data mobility functions that elevate storage system and data center availability to higher

levels, as well as providing nondisruptive, transparent application mobility among hosts servers at the

same or different sites are two notable enhancements. The HP XP7 shares a common technology base

with the Hitachi/HDS VSP G1000, and HP differentiates the XP7 in the areas of broader integration and

testing with the full HP portfolio ecosystem and the availability of Metro Cluster for HP Unix, as well as

by restricting the ability to replicate between XP7 and HDS VSPs.

Positioned in HP's traditional storage portfolio, the primary mission of the XP7 is to serve as an upgrade

platform to the XP-Series installed base, as well as to address opportunities involving IBM mainframe

and storage for HP Nonstop infrastructures. Since HP acquired 3PAR, XP-Series revenue continues to

decline annually, as HP places more go-to-market weight behind the 3PAR StoreServ 10000 offering.

Huawei OceanStor 18000

The OceanStor 18000 storage array supports both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. Data flows are

built around Huawei's Smart Matrix switch, which interconnects as many as 16 controllers, each

configured with its own host connections and cache, with back-end storage directly connected to each

engine. Hardware build quality is good, and shows attention to detail in packaging and cabling. The

feature set includes storage-efficiency features, such as thin provisioning and autotiering, snapshots,

synchronous and asynchronous replication, QoS that nondisruptively rebalances workloads to optimize

resource utilization, and the ability to virtualize a limited number of external storage arrays.

Software is grouped into four bundles and is priced on capacity, except for path failover and load-

balancing software, which is priced by the number of attached hosts to encourage widespread usage.

The compatibility support matrix includes Windows, various Unix and Linux implementations, VMware

(including VAAI and vCenter Site Recovery Manager support) and Hyper-V. Offsetting these strengths

are relatively limited integration with various backup/restore products, configuration and management

tools that are more technology- than ease-of-use-oriented, a lack of documentation and storage

administrators familiar with Huawei, and a support organization that is largely untested outside

mainland China.

IBM DS8870

The DS8870 is a scale-up, two-node controller architecture that is based and dependent on IBM's Power

server business. Because IBM owns the z/OS architecture, IBM has inherent cross-selling, product

integration and time-to-market advantages supporting new z/OS features, relative to its competitors.

Snapshot and replication capabilities are robust, extensive and relatively efficient, as shown by features

such as FlashCopy; synchronous, asynchronous three-site replication; and consistency groups that can

span arrays. The latest significant DS8870 updates include Easy Tier improvements, as well as a High

Performance Flash Enclosure, which eliminates earlier, SSD-related architectural inefficiencies and

boosts array performance. Even with the addition of the Flash Enclosure, the DS8870 is no longer IBM's

high-performance system, and data reduction features are not available unless extra SAN Volume

Controller (SVC) devices are purchased in addition to the DS8870.

Overall, the DS8870 is a competitive offering. Ease-of-use improvements have been achieved by taking

the XIV management GUI and implementing it on the DS8870. However, customer reports are that the

new GUI still needs a more detailed administrative approach, and is not yet suited to high-level

management, as provided by the XIV icon-based GUI. Due to the dual-controller design, major software

updates can disable one of the controllers for as long as an hour. These updates need to be planned,

because they can reduce the availability and performance of the system by as much as 50% during the

upgrade process. With muted traction in VMware and Microsoft infrastructures, IBM positions the

DS8870 as its primary enterprise storage platform to support z/OS and AIX infrastructures.

IBM XIV

The current XIV is in its third generation. The freedom from legacy dependencies is apparent from its

modern, easy-to-use, icon-based operational interface, and a scale-out distributed processing and RAID

protection scheme. Good performance and the XIV management interface are winning deals for IBM.

This generation enhances performance with the introduction of SSD and a faster InfiniBand interconnect

among the XIV nodes. The advantages of the XIV are simple administration and inclusive software

licenses, which make buying and upgrading the XIV simple, without hidden or additional storage

software license charges. The mirror RAID implementation creates a raw versus usable capacity, which

is not as efficient as traditional RAID 5/6 designs; therefore, the scalability only reaches 325TB.

However, together with inclusive software licensing, the XIV usable capacity is priced accordingly, so

that the price per TB is competitive in the market.

A new Hyper-Scale feature enables IBM to federate a number of XIV platforms to create a PB+ scale

infrastructure under the Hyper-Scale Manager to enable the administration of several XIV systems as

one. Positioned as IBM's primary high-end storage platform for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and cloud

infrastructure deployments, IBM has released several new and incremental XIV enhancements,

foremost of which are three-site mirroring, multitenancy and VMware vCloud Suite integration.

NetApp FAS8000

The high-end FAS series model numbers were changed from FAS6000 to FAS8000. The upgrade

included faster controllers and storage virtualization built into the system and enabled via a software

license. Because each FAS8000 HA node pair is a scale-up, dual-controller array, to qualify for inclusion

in this Critical Capabilities research requires that the NetApp FAS8000 series must be configured with at

least four FAS8000 nodes managed by Clustered Data Ontap. This supports a maximum of eight nodes

for deployment with storage area network (SAN) protocols and up to 24 nodes with NAS protocols.



Depending on drive capacity, Clustered Data Ontap can support a maximum raw capacity of 2.6PB to

23.0PB in a SAN infrastructure, and 7.8PB to 69.1PB in a NAS infrastructure.

The FAS system is no longer the flagship high-performance, low-latency storage array for NetApp

customers that value performance over all other criteria. They can now choose NetApp products such as

the FlashRay. Seamless scalability, nondisruptive upgrades, robust data service software, storage-

efficiency capabilities, flash-enhanced performance, unified block-and-file multiprotocol support,

multitenant support, ease of use and validated integration with leading independent software vendors

(ISVs) are key attributes of an FAS8000 configured with Clustered Data Ontap.

Oracle FS1-2

The hybrid FS1-2 series replaces the Oracle Pillar Axiom storage arrays and is the newest array family

in this research. Even though the new system has fewer SSD and HDD slots, scalability in terms of

capacity is increased by approximately 30% to a total of 2.9PB, which includes up to 912TB of SSD. The

design remains a scale-out architecture with the ability to cluster eight FS1-2 pairs together. The FS1

has an inclusive software licensing model, which makes upgrades simpler from a licensing perspective.

The software features included within this model are QoS Plus, automated tiered storage, thin

provisioning, support for up to 64 physical domains (multitenancy) and multiple block-and-file protocol

support. However, if replication is required, Oracle MaxRep engine is a chargeable optional extra.

The MaxRep product provides synchronous and asynchronous replication, consistency groups and

multihop replication topologies. It can be used to replicate and, therefore, migrate older Axiom arrays

to newer FS1-2 arrays. Positioned to provide best-of-breed performance in an Oracle infrastructure, the

FS1-2 enables Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) to optimize Oracle Database performance, as well

as engineered integration with Oracle's virtual machine (VM) and its broad library of data management

software. However, the FS1 has yet to fully embrace integration with competing hypervisors from

VMware and Microsoft.

Context

Even as much of the storage array market is consolidating into one general-purpose market, Gartner

appreciates the entrenched usage and appeal of simple labels. Therefore, even though the terms

"midrange" and "high end" no longer accurately describe present array capabilities, user buying

behaviors or future market directions, Gartner has chosen to publish separate midrange and high-end

Critical Capabilities research (see Note 1). By doing so, Gartner can provide analyses of more arrays in

a potentially more traditional, client-friendly format.

Product/Service Class Definition

Architectural Definitions

The following criteria classify storage array architectures by their externally visible characteristics,

rather than vendor claims or other nonproduct criteria that may be influenced by fads in the disk array

storage market.

Scale-Up Architectures

Front-end connectivity, internal bandwidth and back-end capacity scale independently of each

other.

Logical volumes, files or objects are fragmented and spread across user-defined collections of

disks, such as disk pools, disk groups or RAID sets.

Capacity, performance and throughput are limited by physical packaging constraints, such as the

number of slots in a backplane and/or interconnect constraints.

Scale-Out Architectures

Capacity, performance, throughput and connectivity scale with the number of nodes in the

system.

Logical volumes, files or objects are fragmented and spread across multiple storage nodes to

protect against hardware failures and improve performance.

Scalability is limited by software and networking architectural constraints, not physical packaging

or interconnect limitations.

Hybrid Architectures

Incorporate SSD, HDD, compression and/or deduplication into basic design

Can be implemented as scale-up or scale-out arrays

Can support one or more protocols, such as block or file, and/or object protocols, including FC,

iSCSI, NFS, Server Message Block (SMB; aka CIFS), FCoE and InfiniBand

Including compression and deduplication in the initial system design often results in both having a

neutral to often positive impact on system performance and throughput, as well as simplified

management, in part by eliminating byte boundary alignment considerations in array configurations.

Unified Architectures

Can simultaneously support one or more block, file, and/or object protocols, including FC, iSCSI,

NFS, SMB (aka CIFS), FCoE, InfiniBand and others

Include gateway and integrated data flow implementations

Can be implemented as scale-up or scale-out arrays

Gateway implementations provision block storage to gateways that implement NAS and object storage

protocols. Gateway-style implementations run separate NAS and SAN microcode loads on either

virtualized or physical servers, and, consequently, have different thin provisioning, autotiering,



snapshot and remote copy features that are not interoperable. By contrast, integrated or unified

storage implementations use the same primitives independent of protocol, which enable them to create

snapshots that span SAN and NAS storage, and dynamically allocate server cycles, bandwidth and

cache, based on QoS algorithms and/or policies.

Mapping the strengths and weaknesses of these different storage architectures to various use cases

should begin with an overview of each architecture's strengths and weakness, as well as an

understanding of workload requirements (see Table 1).

Table 1. Strengths and Weaknesses of the Storage Architectures

Strengths Weaknesses

Scale

Up

Mature architectures:

Reliable

Cost-competitive

Large ecosystems

Independently upgrade:

Host connections

Back-end capacity

May offer shorter RPOs over

asynchronous distances

Performance and bandwidth do not scale with capacity

Limited compute power may result in the use of efficiency

and data protection features negatively affecting

performance

Electronics failures and microcode updates may be high-

impact events

Scale

Out

IOPS and GB/sec scale with

capacity

Nondisruptive load balancing

Greater fault tolerance than scale-

up architectures

Use of commodity components

High electronics costs relative to back-end storage costs

Hybrid Efficient use of Flash,

compression and deduplication

Consistent performance

experience with minimal tuning

Excellent price/performance

Low environmental footprint

Relatively immature technology

Limited ecosystem and protocol support

Unified Maximal deployment flexibility

Comprehensive storage efficiency

features

Performance may vary by protocol (block versus file)


Critical Capabilities Definition

Manageability

This refers to the automation, management, monitoring, and reporting tools and programs supported

by the platform. This can include single-pane management consoles, and monitoring and reporting tools

designed to support personnel seamlessly, manage systems, and monitor system usage and

efficiencies.

They can also be used to anticipate and correct system alarms and fault conditions before or soon after

they occur.

RAS

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) is a design philosophy that consistently delivers high

availability by building systems with reliable components, "derates" components to increase their mean

times between failures, and designs systems and clocking to tolerate marginal components.

RAS also involves hardware and microcode designs that minimize the number of critical failure modes in

the system; serviceability features that enable nondisruptive microcode updates; diagnostics that

minimize human errors when troubleshooting the system; and nondisruptive repair activities. User-

visible features can include tolerance of multiple disk and/or node failures, fault isolation techniques,

built-in protection against data corruption, and other techniques (such as snapshots and replication) to

meet customers' RPOs and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Performance

This collective term describes IOPS, bandwidth (MB/second) and response times (milliseconds per I/O)

visible to attached servers. In well-designed systems, the potential performance bottlenecks are

encountered at the same time when supporting various common workload profiles.

When comparing systems, users are reminded that performance is more a scalability enabler than a

differentiator in its own right.

Snapshot and Replication



These features protect against and recover from data corruption problems caused by human and

software errors, and technology and site failures, respectively. They are also useful in reducing backup

windows and minimizing the impact of backups on production workloads.

Archiving also benefits from these features in the same way as backups.

Scalability

This refers to the ability of the storage system to grow not just capacity, but performance and host

connectivity. The concept of usable scalability links capacity growth and system performance to SLAs

and application needs.

Ecosystem

This refers to the ability of the platform to support third-party ISV applications, such as databases,

backup/archiving products and management tools, hypervisor and desktop virtualization offerings, and

various OSs.

Multitenancy and Security

This refers to the ability of a storage system to support a diverse variety of workloads, isolate

workloads from each other, and provide user access controls and auditing capabilities that log changes

to the system configuration.

Storage Efficiency

This refers to the ability of the platform to support storage-efficiency technologies, such as

compression, deduplication, thin provisioning and autotiering, to improve utilization rates, while

reducing storage acquisition and ownership costs.

Use Cases

Overall

Overall use case is a generalized usage scenario. It does not represent the ways specific users will

utilize or deploy technologies or services in their enterprises.

Consolidation

This simplifies storage management and disaster recovery, and improves economies of scale by

consolidating multiple, dissimilar storage systems into fewer, larger systems.

RAS, performance, scalability, and multitenancy and security are heavily weighted selection criteria,

because the system becomes a shared resource, which magnifies the effects of outages and

performance bottlenecks.

OLTP

Online transaction processing (OLTP) is affiliated with business-critical applications, such as database

management systems.

These require 24/7 availability and subsecond transaction response times. Hence, the greatest

emphasis on RAS and performance features, followed by snapshots and replication, which enable rapid

recovery from data corruption problems and technology or site failure. Manageability, scalability and

storage efficiency are important, because they enable the storage system to scale with data growth,

while staying within budget constraints.

Server Virtualization and VDI

This use case encompasses business-critical applications, back-office and batch workloads, and

development.

The need to deliver I/O response times of 5 ms or lower to large numbers of VMs or desktops that

generate cache-unfriendly workloads, while providing 24/7 availability, heavily weights performance

and storage efficiency, followed closely by multitenancy and security. The heavy reliance on SSDs,

autotiering, QoS features that prioritize and throttle I/Os, and DR solutions that are tightly integrated

with virtualization software also makes RAS and manageability important criteria.

Analytics

This applies to storage consumed by big data applications using map/reduce technologies.

It also involves all analytic applications that are packaged, or provide business intelligence (BI)

capabilities for a particular domain or business problem (see definition in "Hype Cycle for Analytic

Applications, 2013").

Cloud

This applies to storage arrays used in private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures, and how they

apply to specific, cost, scale, manageability and performance needs.

Hence, storage efficiency and resiliency are important selection considerations, and are highly

weighted.

Inclusion Criteria

This research evaluates the high-end, general-purpose storage systems supporting the use cases

enumerated in Table 2.

Table 2. Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases



Critical Capabilities Overall Consolidation OLTP Server Virtualization

and VDI

Analytics Cloud

Manageability 13% 12% 10% 13% 15% 16%

RAS 17% 18% 20% 14% 15% 15%

Performance 16% 5% 25% 20% 20% 10%

Snapshot and

Replication

10% 5% 10% 12% 15% 10%

Scalability 13% 15% 15% 9% 10% 15%

Ecosystem 8% 8% 5% 10% 7% 9%

Multitenancy and

Security

11% 18% 5% 10% 8% 15%

Storage Efficiency 12% 19% 10% 12% 10% 10%

Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

As of November 2014


This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products/services.

Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance for specific product/service use

cases.

The 12 storage arrays selected for inclusion in this research are offered by vendors discussed in "Magic

Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays," which includes arrays supporting block and/or file

protocols. Following are the "go/no-go" criteria that must be met for classification as a high-end storage

array. These criteria for qualification as a high-end array are more severe than those for midrange

arrays. For this reason, arrays that satisfy the high-end criteria also satisfy the midrange criteria. More

specifically, high-end arrays must meet the following criteria:

Single electronics failures:

Are invisible to the SAN and connected application servers

Affect less than 25% of the array's performance/throughput

Microcode updates:

Are nondisruptive and can be nondisruptively backed out


Repair activities and capacity upgrades:

Are invisible to the SAN and connected application servers


Support dynamic load balancing

Support local replication and remote replication

Typical high-end disk array ASPs more than $250,000

The storage arrays evaluated in this research include scale-up, scale-out and unified storage

architectures. Because these arrays have different availability characteristics, performance profiles,

scalability, ecosystem support, pricing and warranties, they enable users to tailor solutions against

operational needs, planned new application deployments, and forecast growth rates and asset

management strategies.

Critical Capabilities Rating

Each product or service that meets our inclusion criteria has been evaluated on several critical

capabilities on a scale from 1.0 (lowest ranking) to 5.0 (highest ranking). Rankings (see Table 3) are

not adjusted to account for differences in various target market segments. For example, a system

targeting the small and midsize business (SMB) market is less costly and less scalable than a system

targeting the enterprise market, and would rank lower on scalability than the larger array, despite the

SMB prospect not needing the extra scalability.

Table 3. Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Product or

Service

Ratings

DataDirect

Networks

SFA12K

EMC

VMAX

Fujitsu

Eternus

DX8700

S2

HDS

HUS

VM

HDS

VSP

G1000

HP 3PAR

StoreServ

10000

HP

XP7

Huawei

OceanStor

18000

IBM

DS8870

Manageability 4.0 4.2 3.8 4.0 4.0 4.5 4.0 3.5 4.0

RAS 3.7 4.3 4.2 4.3 4.5 3.7 4.5 4.2 4.2

Performance 4.5 3.8 4.2 3.7 4.3 4.0 4.3 4.0 4.0

Snapshot and

Replication

1.0 4.0 4.0 4.2 4.2 4.0 4.2 4.0 4.0

Scalability 4.5 4.3 4.5 3.3 4.5 4.0 4.5 4.0 3.8



Product or

Service

Ratings

DataDirect

Networks

SFA12K

EMC

VMAX

Fujitsu

Eternus

DX8700

S2

HDS

HUS

VM

HDS

VSP

G1000

HP 3PAR

StoreServ

10000

HP

XP7

Huawei

OceanStor

18000

IBM

DS8870

Ecosystem 2.0 4.5 3.2 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 3.3 3.5

Multitenancy

and Security

3.3 3.7 4.0 4.0 4.2 4.0 4.2 4.0 4.0

Storage

Efficiency

3.2 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.5 4.2 3.5 3.3 3.7

As of November 2014


Table 4 shows the product/service scores for each use case. The scores, which are generated by

multiplying the use case weightings by the product/service ratings, summarize how well the critical

capabilities are met for each use case.

Table 4. Product Score on Use Cases

Use Cases DataDirect

Networks

SFA12K

EMC

VMAX

Fujitsu

Eternus

DX8700

S2

HDS

HUS

VM

HDS

VSP

G1000

HP 3PAR

StoreServ

10000

HP

XP7

Huawei

OceanStor

18000

IBM

DS8870

Overall 3.46 4.03 3.98 3.87 4.18 4.04 4.18 3.83 3.93

Consolidation 3.46 4.00 3.94 3.85 4.13 4.04 4.13 3.79 3.91

OLTP 3.63 4.04 4.06 3.85 4.23 4.01 4.23 3.89 3.96

Server

Virtualization

and VDI

3.38 4.02 3.95 3.88 4.16 4.05 4.16 3.81 3.92

Analytics 3.38 4.03 3.98 3.90 4.18 4.05 4.18 3.84 3.95

Cloud 3.42 4.05 3.97 3.88 4.18 4.06 4.18 3.82 3.93

As of November 2014


To determine an overall score for each product/service in the use cases, multiply the ratings in Table 3

by the weightings shown in Table 2.

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