Strategic Planning, SPA-21-5093 J. Monroe, F. Yale, R. Passmore, J. Opfer, N. Allen, S. Zaffos, R. W Cox, J. Krischer, P. Rinnen, M. Chuba
Research Note 19 November 2003
Predicts 2004: Storage Hardware Technology Will Advance The need for instant data access and increasingly costeffective and flexible systems will shape the technological development and practical deployment of storage components, infrastructures and systems. Core Topic Hardware Platforms: Storage Systems Key Issue How will storage systems evolve during the next five years? Strategic Planning Assumptions By 2006, there will be five or fewer major HDD makers (0.8 probability). Despite minimal shipment growth and actual declines in certain markets, tape technology will continue to prove its value in backup, recovery and archival applications (0.8 probability). By 2005, more new server SAN attachments will use iSCSI than FC for all server price bands (0.7 probability). By 2007, SFF HDDs will be the preferred choice for applications demanding the highest levels of I/O performance (0.8 probability). By 2006, 30 percent of all HDDs configured in multiuser systems will have SATA interfaces (0.8 probability). Storage arrays from different vendors will continue to be incompatible in FC SANs, at least through 2006 (0.7 probability). Aggressively negotiated bids made in competitive environments will reduce acquisition costs by at least 20 percent through 2006 (0.7 probability).
Although hardware performance may exceed software requirements in many IT environments, the forces that dictate explosive storage growth in 2004 and beyond will far outweigh those that inhibit data consumption. Consumers throughout the world have demonstrated an almost insatiable desire to view movies and listen to digital music at home and on the road. The digitization of the world's cultural artifacts is in its infancy, and digital photography is only beginning to make a large-scale impact. More of the world's commerce will be conducted as "e-commerce" (and thus require more data to be online and transactional), and new regulations regarding the preservation of corporate documents will also serve to increase storage requirements. Much like computing, storage will become increasingly ubiquitous; "pervasive computing" (coupled with pervasive storage) is already more than a cliche. The seamless integration of scalable technologies that can enhance a system's ability to handle innumerable transactions per second will become more crucial to the success of any storage strategy. Storage Components: Hard Disk Drives Prediction — At least one major hard disk drive (HDD) vendor will announce an alliance, merger or partial abdication in 2004 There has already been enormous consolidation in the HDD industry, and further consolidation is inevitable. The increasing
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complexity and cost of HDD technology will help drive future consolidation and strategic alliances. Although advances in HDD technology will become more expensive, the HDD makers will still make astonishing progress, reducing production expenses and enhancing key performance and reliability metrics. At the same time, costs per gigabyte will continue to decline, creating solid bargains for end users, but complicating the competitive vendor landscape. Because of unmatched cost and performance efficiencies, HDDs will remain the primary components in all corporate and consumer storage systems. The markets for primary HDD storage will be huge, but only a few gigantic players will survive to address these markets.
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2006, there will be five or fewer major HDD makers (0.8 probability). Action Recommendation for 2004 Despite potential consolidations, major direct customers of the HDD vendors should expect relatively stable mobile and desktop HDD prices in 2004. However, chaotic disruptions in enterprise HDD pricing are possible, partially because of the threat posed by Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA)-interface incursions, and partially because of competitive market share ambitions and surplus production. End users should prepare to take advantage of better cost efficiencies throughout the enterprise storage chain. Storage Components: Tape Drives Prediction — The proliferation of new tape formats will be held in check during the next five years From 1995 through 2003, 19 new tape technologies representing new formats were introduced. In 1998 alone, six new formats entered the market, three from companies already in the industry (Linear TapeOpen by Hewlett-Packard, Seagate and IBM; SDLT by Quantum; and the 9840 drive by StorageTek) and three from startup companies (Benchmark, Ecrix and OnStream). Ecrix ended up merging with Exabyte, Benchmark was acquired by Quantum, and OnStream filed for bankruptcy once, obtained new funding, started up again, then ended up filing for bankruptcy and closing down completely. The experiences of the startups have clearly shown the difficulties in establishing a new tape technology. Of the technologies that have become successful, none has been able to establish a position of clear-cut market domination. © 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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In a market so fragmented, the best chance of success lies with enterprises that have a built-in customer base and large cash reserves. The market potential for any new tape technology is limited; there are already too many formats, and tape systems will have to withstand incursive threats from lower-cost ATA-disk systems. During the next five years, almost all of the advancements in tape will come from succeeding generations of established technologies. Gartner expects to see only one new format introduced from 2004 through 2007.
Strategic Planning Assumption: Despite minimal shipment growth and actual declines in certain markets, tape technology will continue to prove its value in backup, recovery and archival applications (0.8 probability). Action Recommendation for 2004 Users should weigh all of their options in the selection of new tape products, but the final decision should be centered around vendor viability and the credibility of a technology in the present and its road map for the future. Storage Infrastructure: Wheels for the Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) Bandwagon Prediction — In vigorous competition for share of storage area network (SAN) attachments to servers priced below $5,000, Internet Protocol (IP) SANs will surpass Fibre Channel (FC) for low-priced servers in 2004 Although the number of servers priced below $5,000 far exceeds the remainder of the market, until recently, virtually none of these servers had been attached to a SAN. The comparative cost of FC SAN infrastructure was excessive and proven Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) products were not yet available. However, in 2003, blade servers began to use embedded host bus adapters (HBAs) and copper backplane connections to switch blades to dramatically reduce the cost structure for FC. Similar deployments for iSCSI with embedded Ethernet chips are possible at an even lower-than-expected cost. Each of these solutions brings SAN attachment costs into an acceptable range for high-performance blades that are priced well below $5,000. Although the competition between FC and iSCSI is on a relatively level playing field for blade servers, the same is not true for the remainder of this low-priced segment of the server market. Here, the possibility of using a low-cost network interface card (NIC), together with free Microsoft iSCSI initiator software, cannot be surpassed. The volume of deployed Ethernet products also © 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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guarantees a lower port cost for the rest of the required SAN infrastructure. iSCSI at 1 Gbps, lagging 2-Gbps FC performance, will be good enough for many applications. FC will continue to maintain presence for high performance in this space because coming 4-Gbps costs will be favorable compared with 10-Gbps Ethernet alternatives. However, the low cost of iSCSI will quickly give the edge to iSCSI in the numbers game.
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2005, more new server SAN attachments will use iSCSI than FC for all server price bands (0.7 probability). Action Recommendation for 2004 End users should consider the opportunity for SAN attachment for low-priced servers. Opt for SAN attachment where separation of servers and storage provides desired expandability and availability. Choose IP SANs for low-cost connectivity or FC for higher performance as appropriate for the application. Vendors should plan for the coexistence of IP and FC SANs in this market. They should market IP and FC products as complementary, rather than competitive. Storage Systems: Disk Storage Architectures Prediction — A new enterprise hard disk drive form factor will emerge As real-time infrastructures become a reality, enterprises will clearly require FAS systems that support higher-performance scalability characteristics. Random input/output (I/O) performance is largely dependent on spindle count, and proposed new enterprise-class, 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) HDDs can increase spindle count by 50 percent in the same footprint presently required by traditional 3.5-inch HDDs. Configured with rugged and reliable high-grade components that can withstand 100 percent duty cycles at 10,000-rpm and 15,000-rpm spindle speeds, SFF drives will satisfy the moststringent performance and availability demands. SFF drives are also expected to draw less power, a critical attribute that further contributes to improved total cost of ownership (TCO). Initially designed to support Ultra320 SCSI and FC 2Gb interfaces, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) support is expected to be available by late 2004. Currently, no drive maker has any concrete plans to deliver SFF drives with the Serial ATA (SATA) interface.
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2007, SFF HDDs will be the preferred choice for applications demanding the highest levels of I/O performance (0.8 probability).
© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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Action Recommendation for 2004 Users should consider using new SFF drives solely as a highperformance technology that will most likely carry an initial pricing premium over 3.5-inch drives. Storage Systems: Serial ATA in Multiuser Environments Prediction — Budget constraints will acceptance of low-cost storage systems
accelerate
the
"Good enough" has almost always been the enemy of "better," and good enough will prevail in a growing number of storage purchasing decisions. Many users will discover that servers and storage systems configured with SATA HDDs can provide significant cost advantages with minimal, if any, sacrifice in performance, quality or reliability. However, users must remember that SATA is a drive interface; it is not a system solution. For most online applications using midrange and highend storage, SCSI, FC and, in the future, SAS HDDs will remain the more-appropriate choices. Complex corporate storage problems involving heterogeneous networks, servers and datasets may require expensive solutions, and good-enough options will not always suffice.
Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2006, 30 percent of all HDDs configured in multiuser systems will have SATA interfaces (0.8 probability). Action Recommendation for 2004 Explore the possibility of using systems that incorporate SATA HDDs in diverse applications. Demand that vendors justify additional costs for systems that incorporate SCSI or FC HDDs. Accept the fact that low-cost storage systems may have performance limitations or compatibility issues with legacy installations. Carefully determine the cost/performance and data integrity benefits of the system (regardless of the HDD interfaces used). Storage Systems: Heterogeneous Support in SANS Prediction — Interoperability issues among storage vendors' products will continue to plague FC SANs Virtually all storage vendors that integrate and sell SANs will support configurations of heterogeneous operating systems, applications and brands/architectures of servers. However, mixing storage arrays from different vendors is, in general, not supported unless the arrays and the associated HBAs are zoned © 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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to effectively create two SANs that happen to share switches. This state of affairs is not likely to change, because interoperability testing is expensive and the vendors all want to own or control their customer's environments. The one bright spot is that storage resource management (SRM) and SAN management software is evolving to enable a centralized, single point of management of multiple SAN islands, each containing a different vendor's storage. iSCSI SANs also promise to improve interoperability, especially because Microsoft is producing a standard initiator for Windows, which drives all the storage vendors to test to the same data path. This competition may eventually cause FC vendors to change.
Strategic Planning Assumption: Storage arrays from different vendors will continue to be incompatible in FC SANs, at least through 2006 (0.7 probability). Action Recommendation for 2004 Users should continue to choose a single vendor to integrate FC SANs and thereby avoid interoperability issues. Where multiple islands have brought multiple storage vendors in play, users should form strategies and begin to implement single software solutions that work across all the islands. Users should form dedicated storage management teams to drive best practices as a service to the rest of the IS organization. Storage Systems: Disk Array Pricing Trends Prediction — Storage prices will continue to decline, limited only by vendor lock-ins Competition, improvements in technology, a narrowing of functional differences between midrange and high-end storage systems, and more knowledgeable users willing to deploy goodenough storage will continue to drive storage hardware prices down at historically rapid rates. Software license and maintenance fees that were once immune to discounting are now frequently discounted and sometimes bundled with hardware to create a blended price, particularly in strategic accounts and prospect accounts that have not yet deployed value-added features and functions. Nonetheless, the spread between good and bad deals can still easily exceed 300 percent given the strength of vendor lock-ins.
Strategic Planning Assumption: Aggressively negotiated bids made in competitive environments will reduce acquisition costs by at least 20 percent through 2006 (0.7 probability).
© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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Action Recommendation for 2004
Acronym Key ATA Advanced Technology Attachment FAS fabric-attached storage FC Fibre Channel HBA host bus adapter HDD hard disk drive I/O input/output IP Internet Protocol iSCSI Internet SCSI SAN storage area network SAS Serial Attached SCSI SATA Serial ATA SCSI Small Computer System Interface SFF small form factor SRM storage resource management TCO total cost of ownership
Build a storage organization that can effectively manage installed storage assets and aggressively negotiate new equipment acquisitions with storage vendors. This organization should include members with operational, application, financial and marketing expertise. Within this organization, marketing would be responsible for selling the benefits of the IS organization's vision of its future storage infrastructure to users, project managers and senior management. Bottom Line: The "bad news" is that seamless integration of heterogeneous systems and datasets will not become a widespread reality in 2004. The "good news" is that storage technology will continue to advance in multiple directions and dimensions, giving users faster access to critical data, greater reliability and lower costs than ever before. Storage components and systems will continue to deliver some of the best cost and performance metrics in the entire IT industry.
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