Defining storage ‘usability’

22 Nov 2011

Sophistication, masked by simplicity, is what today's small and medium-sized businesses are crying out for when it comes to storage investments. Fortunately, there's never been more choice on offer, says Jessica Twentyman.

But what do we mean by 'usability'? It's certainly a term used widely among storage vendors, who are waging a fierce battle to capture a slice of the market for selling lower-priced, easier-to-use unified storage systems to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

EMC, for example, unveiled its VNX and VNXe systems at the start of the year, in a direct challenge to NetApp, the leader in this market. In April 2011, Dell announced the launch of two new entry-level PowerVault models (NX3500 and MD3600i), also with the needs of SMBs in mind.

Right now, then, small enterprise storage arrays are a particularly vibrant area of the storage market - and that looks set to continue, because server virtualisation is driving huge demand for networked storage, even within relatively small IT departments. But virtualisation also calls for advanced features and high performance, hence the calls for improved 'usability' among customers, particularly those who have few (if any) specialist storage skills in-house.

For customers, usability means three things, says Villars:

1. Inherent flexibility. That, he says, is embodied by systems that support both block- and file-based storage network protocols, so that IT teams can use a single unified system to support a range of storage needs - email archives, database, files and so on.

2. Embedded data efficiency. Usable storage should include support for virtualisation technologies and data management services (such as automated provisioning and data deduplication), which ensure that physical storage capacity doesn't go to waste. At the same time, customers are looking to allocate stored data to the most appropriate medium, according to its value to the business over time. That medium might be (in increasing order of price/performance) slow disk, fast disk or solid state disk, according to how recently data was stored and the likelihood of it being accessed in future. So SMB customers are looking for mixed-media storage arrays, too.

3. Simple capacity provisioning and data protection. SMB customers need storage that provides "common and highly automated provisioning, reallocation and data replication through a simple and intuitive interface," says Villars. That interface, he adds, needs to be "application-aware", so that administrators can easily set up storage pools that are optimised for important and widely-deployed applications.

At many companies, storage usability can't come quick enough. "Decision-makers have become impatient with the care and feeding of their IT infrastructure. Preferred is a model that shields users from arcane IT and storage vocabulary and domain-specific activities (such as how to allocate pooled storage to individual users or applications)," says Villars.

The onus, then, is on vendors to provide that much-needed blend of sophistication masked by simplicity - and at an entry-level price. The market is already crowded, with big players (EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP, for example) competing alongside much smaller ones (Drobo and StoneFly, for example). But what they have in common is that they are placing usability centre-stage.