Tuesday, 1 November 2005

NAS Virtualization Poised to Double Next Year

As data continues to grow at a rate exceeding 60 percent per year, IT managers are taking advantage of many new tools to optimize the utilization of their resources, including a relatively new technology -- Network Attached Storage (NAS) virtualization. A new study by Peripheral Concepts and Coughlin Associates show NAS virtualization as a key enabler of storage consolidation, with uptake likely to double over the next year.

NAS virtualization products create a single logical view across all of the file systems and across multiple NAS systems and are able to non-disruptively migrate data from one storage system to another. This is essential for efficient capacity utilization and sustained performance.

The primary objective of the study, "2005 NAS and NAS Virtualization Report", is to follow the evolution of NAS, determine the acceptance of the various virtualization techniques, and analyze the user requirements and complaints. The analysts surveyed 2,111 IT sites, which totaled 679 petabytes of disk storage and 4,690 NAS systems. Two third of the sites have over 25TB of total disk capacity, up from 40% in a 2002 survey.

NAS market evolution
A number of sites have over 80% of their total disk capacity stored on NAS systems. Sites with over 5 NAS systems represent over one third of the population with NAS. Managing this high number of discrete file systems and dealing with additions, changes and migrations has proven to be a very difficult and time consuming task.

NAS virtualization

Sixteen percent of the sites use some kind of NAS virtualization today, and that number will more than double in the next 18 months. Two thirds of the population using virtualization today will upgrade next year. This represents a considerable amount of virtualization products planned to be purchased in the next twelve to 18 months, and shows a very dynamic acceptance growth for a feature that was hardly talked about three years ago.

Selection criteria

Users cite performance as the major benefit NAS virtualization brings to the management of storage, while scalability and ease of deployment are at the top of the selection criteria when acquiring a virtualization product. Overall system availability remains the top priority, and “No single point of failure” is ranked highest among the concerns in acquiring a virtualization product.

In their search for a complete solution, users like to see replication, backup and mirroring associated to a NAS offer. A majority would rather purchase a complete system as opposed to software only.

The analysts tested the respondents on their awareness of smaller virtualization companies. Naming a few of the prominent new entrants to the NAS arena, to the question “Which of these vendors are familiar to you?”, Of these smaller vendors the respondents were most familiar with Exanet. EMC came first among the vendors which are on their short list for the acquisition of a new virtualization product.