Networked Enterprise Featured Article

EMC (News - Alert) recently announced the availability of ScaleIO Node, a storage area network (SAN) solution that combines software and server infrastructure into a single unit. The end result is a product the company claims has many times more capacity than leading competitors.

Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corporation is a Fortune 500 corporation that provides information technology as a service (ITaaS), and solutions for storage, analytics, big data, security, and infrastructure. In June 2013, it acquired ScaleIO, a Palo Alto (News - Alert), California based company that developed storage solutions for data centers.

In a company-issued datasheet, EMC discusses the problems with what it calls ‘.now’ storage. Motivated by expedience, IT departments have typically expanded storage within an inflexible framework. The end result is siloed storage that does not scale as well as it should, costs more to operate, is overly complex, and falls short of meeting the needs of IT departments.

The improvement on .now is to move to ‘.next’ storage. Instead being dependent on traditional SANs and the inherent inflexibility of their hardware-oriented architecture, .next uses a software-defined infrastructure running on commodity hardware that is much more scalable and flexible.

This results in a superior SAN that EMC claims can support over 1,000 server nodes, when other SANs are limited to about 30; provides 8 times better IOPs performance than traditional SANs; and 50 percent more efficient cooling. It can be configured within a rack system provided by EMC, or a third-party vendor, like Panduit.

As to what the future holds for SANs, it largely depends on who you ask. A recent report from Research and Markets predicts that the global SAN market will be $3.1 billion in 2015 and grow at a rate of 51.3 percent between 2015 and 2020—forecasting nearly eight-fold growth and putting market value at almost $24 billion by 2020.

Another source, one with a contrary opinion, suggests that the cloud will replace external storage systems, which includes SANs, and cites lagging sales numbers as proof.

The problem with that argument is that it lumps SANs in with all external storage systems, so it’s possible that SANs could be doing well, while others are not, making the whole category look bad overall. Nonetheless, if EMC’s claims about ScaleIO Node are accurate, this is a solution that will make SAN enthusiasts very happy.