iSCSI SAN

Windows Storage Server ‘08 shows up

Remember Windows Storage Server 2008, the OEM product from Microsoft built on its Widows Server 2008 file serving capabilities? Microsoft talked about it a bit last year before going quiet – the official Microsoft Windows Storage Server blog was last updated in June.

But Microsoft sent word today that WSS08 was released to OEM partners, which means you should be seeing products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others based on it over the next few months.

Microsoft has taken what was essentially a NAS platform — Windows Storage Server 2003 – and given it block storage capabilities with an iSCSI software target. WSS08 will also include single instance storage to store duplicate files only once. Microsoft will host a webcast introducing WSS08’s new features on Thursday.

Compellent chips away, increases revenue

Of all the storage companies that have reported their earnings for last quarter, only one has increased revenue from the previous quarter. And that was the smallest of the public storage systems vendors – Compellent.

Compellent’s revenue of $28.1 million in the first quarter of 2009 ticked up from $26.7 million in the last quarter of 2008. That earned Compellent $1 million in income. That and a 4% revenue increase are modest under normal circumstances but not bad during a recession. Compellent added 98 customers in the quarter, with 55% of its revenue coming from existing rather than new customers.

“We grew revenue by hitting a lot of singles,” Compellent CEO Phil Soran said. “We did not have large revenue deals to get us to this revenue growth.”

While it’s unlikely that big storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp are worried about a singles-hitter chipping away at their business, Compellent’s success helps showcase what people are spending their storage budgets on these days.

Compellent tends to sell its modular systems to smaller companies who use its software such as thin provisioning and Automated Tiered Storage to manage data better, and then buy more capacity when needed. These customers aren’t cutting back spending as much as large enterprises who have been overbuying storage for years.

“Selling into the enterprise is a little more challenging than in midsize enterprises, but we’ve made some inroads there,” Soran says, pointing to the addition of Travelers Insurance and the FBI as customers. “Large enterprises buy 30 terabytes every month whether they need it or not. The economy has affected them. In midsize companies, they know when they need it and they buy more storage when they need it. Customers still have to store data but find more efficient ways to do it.”

Compellent started rolling out solid state drives last quarter, and Soran says even midrange customers are using them. Hedge fund Munder Capital Management will appear at Compellent’s C-Drive users’ conference next week to discuss its use of SSDs with Complellent’s Storage Center system.

Automated Tiered Storage is a key piece of Compellent’s SSD strategy. The application is designed to move data intelligently among tiers, a capability industry experts and some of Compellent’s large competitors say will be necessary to make SSDs catch on.

“Automated Tiered Storage is the killer app for solid state devices,” Soran said. “People have to find a way to manage inactive data, and solid state heightens the need for it.”

Compellent also facilitates smaller purchases because it has one platform that customers upgrade by adding cards for different functionality and doing software upgrades instead of forklift upgrades. Soran says support for 8 Gbps FC, 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and better integration with server virtualization is on the roadmap.

But Compellent’s streak of 14 straight quarters of sequential revenue growth is in jeopardy. The company’s guidance of from $27 million and $29 million for this quarter means it would have to get nearer the top than the bottom to increase over last quarter. It was also a little lower than financial analysts expected, although analysts see Compellent continue to stroke singles for the near future.

“In the field, we continue to see Compellent experience solid win rates, increasing deal sizes, and nice recurring revenue streams,” Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients. “Overall, we continue to see Compellent winning deals primarily on feature/function and scale.”

StoneFly makes SSD iSCSI SANs a trend

It turns out Dell/EqualLogic isn’t the only vendor with an all-iSCSI SAN system that supports solid state drives (SSDs).

StoneyFly actually beat Dell to its official announcement of the PS6000 today with its rollout of the Voyager, an active-active midrange IP SAN. Voyager is available with Intel X-25E SSDs, or SAS or SATA drives. It also includes a 10-Gigabit Ethernet option – something that is apparently still on the drawing board at Dell.

It seems like just yesterday – or maybe this morning – that SSDs were considered something for super high performance tier 0 applications. Is anybody using iSCSI for that?

StoneFly product manager Jame Ervin says demand is high for SSD as well as 10-GigE.

“We have customers ready to go with SSD the minute it’s available,” she said. “They’re looking for any performance benefit they can get.”

As for 10-gigE, Ervin says it has the greatest appeal among service providers. “Those type of customers seem to have the most interest so far. They seem to be ahead of the game adopting new technologies,” she said.

IDC research analyst Liz Conner doesn’t expect SSD to be a large selling point for iSCSI before 2010, but with iSCSI use growing and budgets shrinking it’s worth taking a look at now.

“I see it popping up more for Fibre Channel SANs, but it will happen with iSCSI,” Conner said. “Most people will go with Fibre Channel for high performance, but with iSCSI offering more high-end features and the way the economy is now, it’s more of an option.”

Conner says 10-gigE is inevitable for iSCSI. “They can say, ‘we’ve got it now, you won’t have to upgrade later,’” she said of StoneFly’s strategy.

Dell/EqualLogic prepares SSD IP SAN

Dell is about to add solid state drive (SSD) support to its EqualLogic iSCSI SANs in a new PS6000 model. As first reported on ChannelWeb last Friday, the PS6000 will also have four Ethernet ports, one more than EqualLogic PS5000 arrays have.

Dell officials did not return requests for comment today by Storage Soup, but several industry sources have confirmed the report is accurate and say the PS6000S will support 16 solid-state drives. A PS6000E will also be available with only SATA drives, according to one customer who asked not to be named because the product has not yet been formally released.

The general opinion on solid state is that customers will hold out for higher capacities and other features before they buy. Several EqualLogic customers reached by Storage Soup today said they still found SATA drives adequate for their needs.

However, according to Alan J. Hunt, Manager of Operations for Dickinson Wright PLLC, “It’s just the beginning of the market. In a few years I suspect [SSDs are] all we’re going to have–it’s kind of the beginning of the next big wave.”

Hunt added that a fourth port on EqualLogic’s arrays could be more significant than it might appear. “A fourth port means you would have balance if you have two switches and want redundancy,” he said. “Or you could make it a dedicated management port and still have three ports.”

Missing from the coming product update, if reports are accurate, would be 10-Gigabit Ethernet support, which a Dell spokesperson said last year is on the EqualLogic roadmap for 2009. But like with SSDs, EqualLogic customers and resellers say 10-Gig Ethernet can wait.

“I haven’t seen a susstantial interest in 10 Gig,” said Broadleaf Services account executive and EqualLogic VAR Christopher Baer. “There aren’t a lot of applications that require that kind of throughput yet.”

Other customers say 10-GigE would future-proof the array, even if they don’t need the bandwidth quite yet. “Why add another port? Why not 10-GigE and really get this thing going?” said a customer in the education field who requested that his name not be used as he is not authorized to speak with the press. Some pieces of the IT infrastructure in this user’s shop have been upgraded to 10-GigE already, including the network backbone.

“I don’t personally need the bandwidth,” Hunt said. “But it could add the ability to reduce the number of cables and passthrough modules for blades, as well as greatly simplifying VMware deployments.”

iSCSI SAN software: riding the winds of change?

Last week, Hewlett-Packard launched its first iSCSI SAN product based on its acquisition last year of LeftHand Networks. As part of that announcement, HP made it official that LeftHand’s days as a software-based iSCSI SAN vendor are over. The company’s SAN/iQ software will continue to use commodity servers for hardware, but those servers from now on will only be manufactured by HP and will be pre-packaged into appliances with LeftHand’s software.

Most of LeftHand’s customers had them delivered like this anyway, as LeftHand’s software met in the channel with servers and were integrated by VARs. Still, come customers said they were disappointed that they could no longer use LeftHand’s software to repurpose existing hardware.

But this is not the first time a storage vendor has begun as a software-only play and moved into the appliance world once it was acquired by a larger vendor. That was the case with Avmar. Avamar began by delivering its host-based data deduplication software as an appliance, but large organizations could get better economies of scale by purchasing their own hardware from their usual supplier, or had standardized on a particular server build and didn’t want a noncompliant appliance sticking out like a sore thumb.

Thus Avamar went software-only, until it was acquired by EMC Corp. Soon after that acquisition EMC rolled out the Avamar Data Store, saying many of its customers didn’t want to have to assemble their own hardware/software clusters, especially in large environments (the company will still sell the product in a software-only version to users who want it, however). It didn’t hurt that EMC’s relationship with Dell flipped that economies-of-scale equation between Avamar and enterprise customers on its head, just like it doesn’t hurt for LeftHand that somewhere in the world, HP produces a ProLiant server every few seconds.

So I couldn’t help but think about all this when I met with a company a couple of weeks ago that has designs on being the heir apparent to LeftHand. StarWind Software and its eponymous iSCSI target software product are not exactly new. The product has been marketed for years by RocketDivision, a company headquartered in the Ukraine, which spun off StarWind Dec. 1.

CEO Zorian Rotenberg said StarWind is going to charge $2,995 for its most deluxe package which includes CDP, snapshots, repolication, mirroring, thin provisioning and an optional virtual tape library interface. That license fee also covers unlimited capacity in perpetuity.

StarWind is far from alone in value propositions of this type from a whole new generation of companies stepping up to pick up where LeftHand left off. StorMagic, Seanodes Open-e, DataCore, and Double Take’s emBoot are all on the market touting the benefits of commodity hardware and affordable, flexible software.

DataCore is a good example of a company that started off and remains software-only. And Enterprise Strategy Group founder Steve Duplessie suggested to me last year that server virtualization may change IT pros’ mentality around software-only storage. Meanwhile, the cloud data center has got people thinking about commodity hardware and horizontally scalable architectures. So it’s possible that the current “class” of iSCSI SAN software vendors will blaze a new trail.

But having watched the lifecycle of Avamar and LeftHand, I’m also wondering if it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.