Why the Time is Now to Transform Your Business with Flash
Servers and networks get relentlessly faster and cheaper with Moore’s Law, and as a result, are now thousands of times faster than the mechanical disk storage to which they connect. From the perspective of today’s processor, the fastest hard drive appears slower than tape did twenty years ago. As a result of this growing mismatch, much of consumer technology has already transitioned from disk to flash memory: flash powers our smartphones and tablets, and underlies high performance websites such as Google, Facebook, and Apple.
Why then is business still shackled to mechanical disk? Until recently, flash has been substantially more expensive than disk, and largely incompatible with existing enterprise computing architectures. Pure Storage was founded to overcome these hurdles by delivering all flash storage that preserves investment in applications and infrastructure, and costs less than the mechanical alternatives. Accomplishing this required a holistic rethink of enterprise storage, and yielded a product radically better in every dimension: 10X faster, 10X more power & space efficient, 10X simpler, and more reliable, but who’s CapEx is comparable to the disk alternatives, and who’s OpEx is radically better.
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All-Flash Arrays: The Evolution of Storage & Flash
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Transitioning to the All-Flash Enterprise
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Solving the Flash for All Economics
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Flash for All Applications 8
The Business Beneits of Flash for All
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Flash for All: It’s Time 10
From the Gartner Files: Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2013 15
About Pure Storage
Featuring research from
Flash for All
How every business can improve eficiency, compete better, and
deliver compelling user experiences with lash
Scott Dietzen CEO
Transitioning to an all-flash enterprise enables three important business benefits:
1. Achieve business results that are not even imaginable with disk. Legacy technologies introduce bottlenecks in the compute architecture, but their real bottleneck is they constrain the imagination of your business architects. They constrain what you think is possible: how much data you can analyze, how fast you can respond to a customer, how quickly you can launch a new service? Moving to flash can speed your existing revenue-driving business applications, but it will also unlock a whole new level of exploration by your innovators into the art of the possible. What will your business achieve with flash?
2. Deliver differentiated, compelling end-user experiences. Computing and IT is fundamentally a tool in service to an ultimate end-user, whether that end-user be a consumer using a mobile device, a trader consuming real-time financial analysis, or a doctor logging patient information into a VDI terminal. Computing is about enabling people to feel, enjoy, and achieve. Whatever your business, you compute to deliver compelling end-user experiences, and flash is key to taking those experiences to the next level.
3. Achieve new levels of efficiency in the storage factory. As enterprise IT evolves to private cloud architectures, it is increasingly clear that storage is a key platform service in the private
cloud. Moving to flash is a critical initiative to achieve more efficient storage service delivery. Flash combines fundamental improvements (10X less power, 10X less rack space, 10X less power/cooling) with a new level of administrative simplicity that allows for a dramatically less expensive storage factory. Pure Storage has cracked the code on how to deliver an all-flash storage platform that enables flash for all: flash for all applications, flash for all customer types/sizes, and flash for all budgets. But the real story is you: what you will achieve by going all flash. We hope this paper will help set you down the path of discovering your all-flash future.
Source: Pure Storage
Flash for All is published by Pure Storage. Editorial content supplied by Pure Storage is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2013 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of Pure Storage’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp.
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: The City of Davenport saw6.5-to-1 data reduction as well as linked clones
replication from 45 minutes down to two. Average write latency went from 20ms to 1ms, and read from 17ms to 0.5ms.
The Business Benefit: Because they decided to use virtual desktops
instead of buying physical desktops, the FlashArray has already paid for itself – within their budget. And there’s still extra capacity to take on additional workloads.
“Anyone who is going to do a VMware View deployment should put their linked clones on a Pure Storage array. It’s essential.” Cory
Smith, Network Administrator
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: After deploying the Pure Storage FlashArray, ARcare has achieved 5-to-1 data
reduction and has reduced their data footprint by 79%.
The Business Benefit: ARcare experienced immediate performance improvements across all applications after migrating to the Pure Storage FlashArray. Latency issues were eliminated with sub-millisecond response rates for virtual desktop users despite any additional network or application activity, including patching.
“I can’t stress the FlashArray at all; it can handle anything I throw at it.” Adam Ausburn, Network & Virtualization Administrator
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3 most vendors retrofitted 5-10% flash storage
into their architectures to attempt to speed-up the disk arrays via caching & tiering technologies.
While flash caching/tiering provided some noticeable improvement, the hybrid flash/disk array model also suffered from increased complexity and inherently variable performance: users simply didn’t know whether a given storage IO would be serviced at flash speed (<1 millisecond) or disk speed (5-10 milliseconds). So ultimately the storage industry realized that to make it to the next plateau of performance, you simply had to go “all flash,” and you really needed to design an array from the ground-up for flash memory, hence the birth of all-flash arrays. In parallel, a similar evolution was happening in the flash world. Flash entered enterprise computing in the form of PCIe flash cards and flash SSDs, both of which were good for accelerating a single application in a single server. While this was helpful for some point Flash storage and disk storage have been
on different evolution paths, but they have converged to create the ideal storage platform for enterprise computing.
Disk storage has been the dominant storage platform for the enterprise for the better part of 50 years, but spinning disk has run into a fundamental problem: it gets bigger every year on a capacity basis, but it doesn’t get any faster (limited by the fundamental rotational physics), so it actually gets slower every year on a performance-per-capacity basis. As a result, the storage industry has been desperately enhancing disk-based storage arrays for the past decade to try and keep up with the continuous compute advances driven by Moore’s Law. In the early 2000s the dominant strategy was “more disk” – or wide striping, where more and more disk spindles were thrown inside arrays to improve performance. As this became clearly inefficient and unworkable, flash storage entered the scene as a method for adding performance to disk arrays, so
All-Flash Arrays: The Evolution
of Storage & Flash
applications, enterprises are fundamentally built on consolidated, clustered, and resilient application architectures leveraging shared storage, and the server-by-server approach to early flash had limited appeal. Flash devices then grew into “Flash Appliances” – slightly larger (1-20TB) flash devices that could be networked and had additional resiliency, enabling them to be shared by small compute clusters. But these flash appliances lacked the rich software layer that was common in enterprise disk arrays: complete resilience through RAID and HA, snapshots, replication, encryption, data reduction technologies, and deep application integration. They were also very expensive – often costing 5X the cost of comparable enterprise disk arrays. And so the next natural step in the evolution was clear: marry the “all flash” performance, space, and efficiency advantages of the flash appliances with the enterprise-quality features of the disk arrays to build a product from the ground up that combines the best of both worlds: the All-Flash Array.
The results are stunning: All-Flash Arrays represent an order-of-magnitude gain in the key dimensions that are used to evaluate storage – performance, size/rack space, power consumption, and management simplicity. They help storage keep pace with compute by moving from 10s of thousands of IOPS of performance to 100s of thousands, and reduce latency from 5-10ms to <1 ms. They take the advantages of early flash products, but deliver them in an array form-factor that achieves the resiliency, scale, and simplicity that allows enterprises to easily adopt them in their existing infrastructure.
And the final, and perhaps most important break-through has been price. By marrying advances in consumer-grade MLC flash memory with inline data reduction technologies like deduplication and compression, all-flash array vendors like Pure Storage have been able to break the price barrier, delivering all-flash arrays for the same cost or even lower than legacy disk architectures on a $/usable GB basis. In the end the big winners in this transition are enterprise storage customers and end users. After living with incremental advances
in disk storage for decades that saw compute improvements fundamentally out-strip storage to the point where storage is the bottleneck in most environments, customers can now unlock a 10X improvement in the storage architecture at constant or even reduced spend without having to go through a massive upheaval in their infrastructures. Going through this transition will create massive opportunities for improving their operational efficiency, and accomplishing things in business that simply weren’t possible before.
Source: Pure Storage
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: TripPak attained 6-to-1 datareduction of servers, Citrix XenDesktops,
Oracle, and SQL Databases running on vSphere 5.0.
The Business Benefit: With the FlashArray in place, TripPak customers
are experiencing lightning-fast response times from their high workload database queries. TripPak IT is using less power, less space, and increasing performance by 10X, while their environment has plenty of headroom to grow as they move more workloads over to the FlashArray.
“The FlashArray is a storage guy’s dream. We love the design!”
David Abbott, Sr. Infrastructure Engineer
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: Siemens saw 6.7-to-1 data reduction after implementing the FlashArray. They also saw 4X improvement per instance in VM provisioning time. The Business Benefit: Prior to migrating to the Pure Storage FlashArray, Siemens was having issues with scalability. Now, as they grow, they can easily – and non-disruptively – scale their storage to meet the demands of their diverse set of engineering, QA, support, training, and customer demo needs.
“Even with 50 VMs running all day on one LUN, we’re not even pushing the storage.” Bryan Bond, Sr. Systems Administrator
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Transitioning to the All-Flash Enterprise
Now that All-Flash Arrays have emerged as the evolution of storage, most enterprises will move to a model where their core business runs on flash within 5 years. For some of the most aggressive this will mean that they will literally eliminate disk, as the leading enterprises, consumer web companies are increasingly doing. For others, that will mean that disk will still be used, but the large majority of applications that power the business will run on an all-flash architecture. In the end whether you actually remove every spinning disk is beside the point: flash will power the apps that drive your business.
In addition to the advent of the All-Flash Array, the other force powering this change is the progression down the virtualization journey that enterprises are taking towards private cloud architectures. As organizations moved to virtualize their servers, a common model was to implement “tiers of storage” – multiple combinations of slow disk, fast disk, tape, and sometimes even flash to deliver different service levels and storage costs for applications.
This model worked fine for early virtualization, where consolidation was limited and where most deployments were application islands. As virtualization pushes towards the true private cloud, deeper infrastructure consolidation starts to happen – where large compute farms share resources with 100s or 1,000s of heterogeneous applications. Enabling this model requires a higher-performance storage tier capable of mixing workloads and delivering predictable service levels for all apps, but also fits an economic profile that makes widespread deployment possible.
As such, we see the storage architecture of tomorrow being highly streamlined, simplified, and consolidated into two main tiers: a “performance tier” for business applications served by All-Flash Arrays, and a “capacity tier” served by SATA disk, serving 2nd/3rd tier applications, content farms, backups, and archiving. Virtualization provides the perfect abstraction layer to enable movement of workloads between these tiers based upon changing needs.
The technical reasons for moving to all-flash are clear, but there has been one final (and perhaps more important) inhibitor to flash memory adoption in the enterprise: simple economics. With flash media historically 5-10X more expensive than disk, most enterprises just couldn’t afford to move to all-flash broadly.
This is where some of the innovations that Pure Storage has pioneered in the all-flash array space shine: put simply we make all-flash storage affordable for everyone, and we make it affordable enough to use broadly across your enterprise. By combining low-cost consumer grade flash memory (which we make enterprise resilient through our FlashArray architecture and Purity software) with inline data reduction technologies (deduplication, compression, thin provisioning), we are able to reduce the cost of 100% flash memory to under the cost of spinning disk on a straight CapEx basis. Then, if
you are willing to consider the OpEx savings (maintenance, power, cooling, data center rack space, and management cost), we are able to reduce the cost even further to the point where most deployments realize substantial savings, as shown below. While these results are impressive and justify the all-flash storage purchase on their own, for most customers the real advantage comes in the up-stream impact to their business. What value do you put on getting a competitive advantage in the marketplace? On delivering better service for your customers? On generating higher customer loyalty? On happier end users? On being able to analyze substantially more data to make better-informed business decisions? Downstream costs will help you justify the move to flash, but the up-stream business benefits will be the real reward.
Source: Pure Storage
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7 The early days of flash deployments were
largely centered on accelerating point database applications where storage IO was the key bottleneck. Now that Pure Storage has broken the price barrier for flash, all-flash storage is suitable for a wide range of enterprise applications.
Across the Pure Storage user base, we see three main use cases where customers are adopting flash. Because data types vary in deduplication potential and compressibility, data reduction rates vary slightly across these use cases, ranging from 2-4X for databases which are compression-driven, up to greater than 10X for VDI which achieves very high deduplication results. Server Virtualization is a key driver of flash adoption. As workloads consolidate and virtualization ratios top 50+ VMs/server, the
IO stream down to storage becomes highly random. Traditional disk architectures just don’t handle random IO well, making disk the key bottleneck in expanding server virtualization. To make matters worse, virtualization deployments often start with the “easiest” VMs, so as customers expand to virtualized Tier 1 applications, the IO bottleneck gets worse. Flash is the answer to keep on the path to enterprise-wide virtualization.
Databases and Analytics are some of the most obvious fits for flash. Storage IO is often the key wait time in enabling databases to process more transactions, or analytic queries to complete faster. In addition to processing more transactions and analyzing more data at lower storage cost, moving to flash storage often enables massive consolidation at the application tier.
Since each database instance can now do more work, enterprises can typically reduce instances, leading to direct cost savings in terms of both hardware and database license savings.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is perhaps the perfect use case for flash. It requires a very high level of performance as disk IO is directly in the end-user experience path, it drives highly random IO due to the high consolidation, and cost is at a very high premium, since VDI ROI cases are fragile at best. Leveraging all-flash storage provides the absolute best end-user desktop experience, and since VDI is one of the most reducible workloads in the data center, the FlashArray is able to drive the cost of all-flash VDI to well under the cost of spinning disk.
Source: Pure Storage
The Business Benefits of Flash for All
Achieving Business Results that Are NotEven Imaginable with Disk We have to build our businesses and compute infrastructures around the tools we have in a given generation, and the capabilities and limitations of these tools define both what we achieve, but on a more fundamental level, our expectation of what is possible. Moving to flash will have an immediate, quantifiable improvement in your existing business infrastructure: process more transactions, analyze more data, answer questions faster: and be more agile and responsive. But a whole lot more is possible: results that weren’t even imaginable when you limited your thinking to disk.
What that hidden advantage is and how it turns into revenue will vary widely depending on your unique business and industry, but imagine how you’d fare on the playing field vs. your competition with an all-flash architecture powering your business. Imagine taking the storage bottleneck out of the compute chain, accelerating each of your core business applications dramatically. Imagine the levels of analysis possible, accessing larger data sets with more complex queries, asking questions and finding answers in your data that were stuck inaccessible on disk.
Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and you choose not to take the path of flash when one of your key competitors does. How will it change the dynamics of your market, and which side of the playing field do you want to occupy?
Deliver Differentiated, Compelling End-User Experiences for All
Most computing today is done in the service of some ultimate end-user, typically either an employee or a customer of your company. While moving to flash has the tangible business benefits we discussed earlier, it also has a dramatic impact on the experience of users, and happier employees and end-users are directly connected to profitable businesses. Now flash for all enables you to deliver the all-flash experience to all the end users you serve. On the employee side, flash for all is about unlocking the productivity and creativity of your workforce, and delivering a computing experience that results in delight vs.
frustration. This has hard-cost elements (less calls to the help desk, less working around IT), but the real benefits come in better empowerment and employee engagement. For most business, employees are the core, and the relative cost of empowering your employees with the absolute best computing experiences possible pales in comparison to both what you pay your employees, and the productivity gain you’ll achieve from these investments. Delivering anything less than the all-flash user experience for your employees just doesn’t make economic or business sense.
And on the end-user customer side, study after study has shown a direct link between customer satisfaction and loyalty to business profitability and growth. Flash for all enables you to create new and differentiated customer experiences. Think: search results that appear before you finish typing, a world of information accessible in the palm of your hand, immersive gaming experiences, and customer support that is always a step ahead. How can you win the hearts, minds, and loyalty of your customers with flash?
Achieve New Levels of Efficiency in the Storage Factory
If you dive into your organization and talk to folks high and low about storage, you’ll probably find a disturbing reality:
Your Storage Admins don’t really like their current storage array. Why is that? As storage has failed to keep up with the compute infrastructure, Storage Admins are often the people stuck in the middle between increasing business demands, flat budgets, calls about slow performance. Disk has simply gotten way too complex over the years, it is failing to meet the business demands, and they are left to take the blame and solve the problem, usually with more disk. Your CIO doesn’t really like disk storage. When the CIO looks at the current disk storage platform and how it is contributing to his/ her objectives (adopting the private cloud, greening the datacenter, achieving results for the business), again disk finds itself on the “red” side of the equation more often than not. Disk is preventing server virtualization, sapping too much power in the datacenter, and holding back the business.
Flash provides an answer to both these challenges, it is the building block of a fundamentally more efficient storage architecture: one that turns Storage Admins into heroes and gives them time and sanity back in their days, and one that helps CIOs meet their annual objectives, helping IT contribute to the business as opposed to being a cost center. A transition to flash has the opportunity to change the storage equation from one that is a 360° liability to a technology that enables.
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Flash for All: It’s Time
Why Buy Disk?
If you are involved with the process of running, buying, or being an end user of enterprise storage, we hope this short paper has given you a window into the opportunity that Flash for All presents to your business, and maybe you’ll think twice before blindly signing another storage contract. You have the opportunity to buy storage that can contribute to the efficiency of your organization, enable a competitive advantage for your business, and give you the technology to deliver a compelling all-flash experience for your users. We hope you consider Pure Storage for your next storage purchase, but most of all we hope you make the choice to try flash. Once you’ve experienced flash, you’ll likely never go back.
We’re So Confident in Flash for All, It’s Guaranteed
We’re so confident in the Pure Storage FlashArray that all FlashArray purchases come with the storage industry’s broadest guarantee: the Love Your Storage Guarantee. If our storage doesn’t meet our high promises and your high expectations, you can return it for a full refund. Read more about the guarantee at purestorage.com/ guarantee.
Source: Pure Storage
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: By switching their storage to thePure Storage FlashArray, Riverview Hospital
was able to achieve 8-to-1 data reduction with hundreds of persistent desktops. They increased virtualized SQL database IOPs by 2X, and reduced latency from 2-8ms down to 0.5ms.
The Business Benefit: Through the deployment of end-to-end
flash-based storage, Riverview improved the productivity of its caregivers by minimizing delays in accessing patient data.
“Our most important clinical systems now run on Pure.” Jason
Pearce, Enterprise Architect
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT:
The Results: Yodle achieved a 5-to-1 data reduction of PostgreSQL DB despite entirely new
DB at every restore. Through the Pure Storage FlashArray deployment, they were able to virtualize their database environment and add analytics processing to the same environment.
The Business Benefit: By replacing their server and adding a Pure Storage FlashArray, Yodle dropped their rebuild process from 24 to 3 hours for the development environment, and from 7 to one for the analytics rebuild – huge time-savings for their team.
“The biggest surprise was what a dramatic different we saw in build time.” John Merryman, CTO
Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies,
2013
From the Gartner Files:
This research details five companies that provide innovative storage capabilities and/ or contain the costs associated with storage and its operational management. Gartner also takes a look back at two vendors that were profiled in a previous Cool Vendors report.
Key Findings
• CTERA Networks offers unique, unified cloud storage integration hardware and software (including EFSS) within an expanding partner ecosystem. • Delphix can significantly help contain
the storage requirements and overall cost and time associated with reducing the typical five to 12 full copies of each production database.
• Panzura addresses the difficult global file-locking problem with its distributed file system appliances supporting cloud storage.
• Pure Storage enhances inexpensive consumer PC SSDs through flash-optimized, in-line data reduction and management software, delivering a simple, cost-effective, all-flash alternative to HDD/SSD storage arrays.
• Scality offers software based scale-out storage with heterogeneous API support to tackle a variety of big data and cloud workloads.
Recommendations
• Include CTERA Networks when implementing an integrated private or public cloud storage environment to support branch offices and mobile users. • Examine Delphix’s solution to deliver
improved database service levels and capabilities, and as part of a prudent cost containment and efficiency strategy.
• Evaluate Panzura to implement scalable, secure global file access and storage consolidation among multiple sites and to back up and archive to the cloud.
• Consider Pure Storage when application workloads demand a cost-effective, all-flash system solution and can benefit from in-line data reduction.
• Consider Scality when building scale-out object storage architectures for cloud storage and active archiving. Analysis
This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
What You Need to Know
IT managers often share common goals, including a need to modernize their storage infrastructures and improve quality of service while simultaneously containing costs. New storage components, solutions and management tools can help stakeholders build easier-to-manage, more efficient and more available storage infrastructures. Many organizations are evaluating technologies that will drive efficiency, such as higher-performing and highly automated storage, cloud-based solutions, and/or management products that allow for proactive problem avoidance and increased resource utilization and optimization.
This research details five emerging private vendors that can assist organizations in meeting their IT modernization and cost containment initiatives.
CTERA Networks
Palo Alto, CA (www.ctera.com) Analysis by Gene Ruth
Why Cool: CTERA Networks is a privately held company that offers cloud storage gateway and related infrastructure products to connect datacenters and branch offices to public or private storage clouds. The offerings are suitable for small or midsize businesses (SMB) and enterprise customers as well as service providers (telcos, management service providers [MSPs]) and integrators in enabling cloud storage solutions.
The CTERA Networks offerings address file sync and share, backup and primary data delivery using on-premises hardware optimized to transport data to a public or private cloud environment. The company uniquely offers a cost-efficient solution to support remote and branch office (ROBO) environments on a large scale. The lightweight local footprint of a CTERA Networks storage unit, the elimination of additional backup software and the resultant operational simplification make CTERA Networks an attractive solution for supporting extensive ROBO environments. CTERA Networks is positioning itself to address the quickly expanding cloud storage integration market with a low-cost solution and significant array of partnerships. The partnership ecosystem continues to expand with native integration of CTERA Networks’ capability into the CISCO Integrated Service Routers Generation 2 (ISR), integration with EMC’s Atmos, IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), Hitachi Data Systems’ Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Dell DX, OpenStack Swift and many relationships with telcos and MSPs in Europe and the U.S. The addition of a file sync and share capability enhances the value proposition and provides a unique competitive advantage, which dovetails nicely with the cloud storage paradigm and
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11 file collaboration opportunities. Additionally,
CTERA Networks also provides cloud storage orchestration and automation software to enable service providers providers to deliver multitenant public cloud storage services similar to Amazon S3.
Challenges: CTERA Networks is a relatively new company, founded in 2008 and competing in an intensely active segment of the market. Their presence is growing in the U.S. with SMB customers (from a revenue perspective) and in Europe with a number of large telco and communication service provider (CSP) partners. As a small but fast-growing company, risk exists that CTERA Networks may struggle to adequately deliver in a timely manner to its diverse customer set. In addition, the cloud storage and enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) markets are nascent and, thus, customers should be cautious and expect that many of the participating vendors will be acquired or fail, with only a few vendors remaining independent over the next five years.
Who Should Care: CTERA Networks should be of interest to any IT organization that is looking for a cost-effective unified solution to support a public or private cloud storage environment with file sync and share capability behind their own firewall or as a branded service provider to support ROBO environments and mobile users.
Delphix
Menlo Park, CA (www.delphix.com) Analysis by Dave Russell
Why Cool: Delphix’s Agile Data Platform is a software product that can significantly speed up operations and the amount of time it takes to test production databases, run reporting and analytics and refresh data from days to minutes, all while applying compression and even avoiding the need for deduplication (since no redundant blocks
are ever copied) to shrink the footprint of required storage. Delphix’s database virtualization solution can dramatically reduce the number of physical copies of a single database, thus significantly improving capacity utilization by decreasing the amount of storage and power consumed. Perhaps of even greater interest is the very fast availability (restore) and test and development support that the solution can provide.
Currently, Delphix supports Oracle Databases (including those running on Exadata) and Microsoft SQL Server databases, with plans to add Postgres and Sybase in 2013 and MySQL in 2014. The Agile Data Platform makes a one-time full copy of the application’s blocks of data onto any storage device, applying compression that typically yields a 2.7x space reduction. Then, periodic log shipping and block change tracking keeps the Delphix copy updated. Pointer redirection allows for any point in time (APIT) recovery and can utilize a single copy to rapidly serve up space-efficient full instances of database images for testing or recovery in minutes versus hours. The product installs as a virtual appliance without any agents, sits out of band and provides IP-based replication to another Delphix instance if desired.
Delphix has been in business since 2008, with over $45 million in funding. It has been shipping product since 2011, with over 100 customers including Comcast, Facebook, Proctor and Gamble and Informatica. The company claims over 100 employees, with engineers that previously worked on the Oracle Sun ZFS filesystem, Oracle’s Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Data Guard, VMware’s replication solution and EMC’s Avamar. Delphix has partnerships with SAP and system integrator Deloitte, which includes SAP selling the solution through its 5,000-plus person sales force.
Challenges: Any emerging vendor typically raises some degree of concern for an IT organization, and this will likely be very much the case for a provider that typically targets very large enterprises and has an average transaction price of over $250,000. Organizations will want to perform due diligence to get comfortable with a solution that connects with production applications. Other challenges are that database administrators will need to be comfortable with the product having the credentials to make periodic calls to the database and the future concept of database vendor(s) potentially adding virtualization and data reduction capability natively in its product. Who Should Care: While Delphix predominantly targets the CIO or vice president of infrastructure and application, Gartner believes that directors of storage and storage administrators that are responsible for providing database capacity and availability should examine Delphix’s solution as a means of improving service levels through reduced provisioning times and as part of a prudent cost containment and efficiency strategy.
Panzura
Campbell, CA (www.panzura.com) Analysis by Pushan Rinnen
Why Cool: Founded in July 2008 in San Jose, CA, with a total venture funding of $33 million, Panzura offers global distributed file system appliances with multisite global file locking and global deduplication, local file pinning, and cloud storage integration. The company has gained market traction since product launch with over 100 customers by the end of 2012, 50% of which are multi-billion-dollar organizations.
The Panzura architecture is primarily designed to build a private network in conjunction with public clouds. The Quicksilver Cloud Storage Controllers are
a series of virtual and physical network-attached storage (NAS) appliances that have solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard drives for local cache (up to 36TB raw today) to store the most frequently accessed data, while pushing the majority of infrequently accessed data to the private or public cloud. The file-locking mechanism embedded in its global namespace solves the problem of global cache coherency among multiple sites and can scale better than Microsoft’s DFS. Panzura’s primary use case is global content access and cross-geo project sharing by consolidating NAS devices and local file servers. Because all sites see the same file system and site controllers can be added to the same network transparently, the solution can speed up global workflow process and make the distributed storage infrastructure more efficient. The Panzura solution is also used by customers to back up and archive data to the cloud, because Panzura supports high-throughput capability for Symantec’s NetBackup and IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager, as well as archiving tools such as Atempo Digital Archive and Symantec Enterprise Vault.
The Panzura solution supports most major cloud storage providers at the back end such as Amazon, Nirvanix, Google, as well as EMC’s Atmos-based cloud providers and public clouds from Dell, HP and IBM. Most of these partners also resell the Panzura solution, which offers AES-256 encryption for data at rest and TLS for data in flight and, with its FIPS 140-2 government security certification, has gained several large federal government customers. Panzura’s other customers include companies from the media/entertainment, healthcare, financial services and research and education fields. Challenges: Panzura faces the challenge of debunking the common perception that cloud storage is only for small businesses and small workloads. It also needs to expand its ecosystem by adding more support for on-premises applications.
When Panzura is used to support traditional applications such as backup, it may have compatibility issues, resulting in certain application functions not working properly. On the global file access front, Panzura lacks the mobile device support, which is offered by file sync and share services. The company needs to expand its ecosystem by adding more independent software vendor (ISV) support in the backup and archiving arena. Who Should Care: Panzura should appeal to midsize to large organizations that want to implement private or hybrid cloud storage to consolidate multisite file storage, offer more effective project and data sharing, and provide backup and archiving to the inexpensive public cloud.
Pure Storage
Mountain View, CA (www.purestorage.com) Analysis by Joseph Unsworth and John Monroe
Why Cool: Pure Storage was founded in 2009 on the premise of building an in-line, flash-optimized deduplication and compression software architecture around relatively inexpensive PC SSDs to deliver a cost-effective SSD appliance. Pure Storage leverages the commodity multilevel cell (MLC) SSD form factor in its arrays, today sourcing SSDs from leading PC SSD supplier Samsung; however, Pure’s innovation is centered around their core competency in software.
Pure Storage has over 30 patents from areas such as deduplication, flash management and resiliency, which are all critical elements when solely relying on flash memory technology for persistent storage in data center environments. Pure Storage boasts flash-specific software features with the most interesting being in-line deduplication/ compression typically at a rate of 5-to-1, high-availability with nondisruptive upgrades, snapshots and replication that
represent minimal overhead on system performance and latency. With system price-points ranging around $10/GB for usable capacity and Pure Storage’s strategy of enhancing the most capable, cost-effective PC grade SSD, they have distanced themselves from the challenges of flash hardware management, opting instead to rely on their core competencies in software. Pure Storage has raised $95 million in aggregate, including its latest series-D funding in 2012. This funding ensures financial stability in the near-term and the ability to scale in a dynamic, ultra-competitive market that is still in its infancy. Pure Storage has over 200 customer wins, a testament to not only their software but the simplicity with which it can be integrated within existing storage architectures. Challenges: Pure Storage’s greatest challenge will be articulating its value proposition clearly and effectively as a startup in a landscape fraught with hype and confusion disseminated by a crowd of new and traditional storage array vendors. Pure Storage does not have the fastest nor largest capacity system (up to 40TB per system) in the market, but it is the software differentiation and optimization selling points that will need to be reinforced along with customer wins. This will be particularly important since Pure Storage is relying only on value-added resellers (VARs) and reseller partnerships as a path to market.
Who Should Care: Data center professionals who demand higher storage platform performance supported by capable data management software features. The application workload demand and complexity will dictate the need for such solutions, especially in highly virtualized environments such as virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), front-end Web indexing, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, data warehouses and high-performance computing applications.
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Scality
San Francisco, CA (www.scality.com) Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran and Alan Dayley
Why Cool: Scality is a venture-backed, privately held company headquartered in Silicon Valley and an R&D team in France that offers scale-out, software-based storage that can potentially deliver massive scalability, high availability and data protection at lower costs. While Scality’s primary focus has been on the object storage space, the vendor has an aggressive road map for unified storage with block and scale-out file system capabilities targeting enterprise workloads that need high performance.
Scality’’s RING Organic Storage topology is based on a peer-to-peer architecture, which means that there are no master nodes and no single point of failure. Both data and metadata is distributed across the nodes in a shared-nothing model with parallel infrastructure and operations (I/O) paths. The architecture provides near-linear performance aggregation, allowing customers to achieve incremental capacity and performance gains at a lower cost. By packaging multiple storage nodes and I/O daemons at a server level, and due to its unified storage architecture, Scality is able to potentially target more versatile and performance-oriented workloads that are beyond the purview of many object storage vendors.
Scality offers simple software replication and configurable erasure coding that can significantly reduce storage overheads, provide self-healing and improve data rebuild times, which may improve costs, availability and manageability on a PB scale. Given the fragmented nature of APIs in the object storage space, Scality has taken
a more neutral approach by supporting APIs from Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and CDMI, apart from its proprietary API. This heterogeneous API support will be a critical need for customers planning hybrid cloud storage implementations. Scality’s integration work with Apache Hadoop and OpenStack expands its addressable market opportunity although it faces significant competition from more-established vendors in each of these initiatives.
Challenges: Scality is in direct competition not only with other object storage vendors, many of whom have been around for a longer time, but also with large unified storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp. Hence, Scality faces huge barriers to entry posed by the significant R&D, marketing prowess and deep relationships that the incumbent storage vendors possess. Additionally, Scality has a distributed team with R&D based in France and sales, marketing and operations in the U.S., which has the potential to affect time to market and possibly create cultural gaps. While there has been a lot of buzz about “software-defined storage” of late, Scality’s software form factor is an inherently difficult value proposition to sell in an industry where storage is normally associated with hardware, which needs a very different distribution, support and sales model. Who Should Care: IT leaders, technical architects and application owners in both enterprise and service provider environments looking for scalable, self-healing and cost-effective storage for cloud and big data workloads should consider Scality. Gartner expects the initial interest to come from cloud service providers evaluating software as a service (SaaS) storage and storage as a service, and enterprises looking for an active archive solution.
Where Are They Now?
Nimble Storage
San Jose, CA (www.nimblestorage.com) Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran
Why Cool Then: Nimble Storage’s flagship product is an innovative Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) based storage array that is optimized for flash. Nimble’s architecture, known as Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL), achieves high write performance by turning random I/O into sequential I/O. CASL does this by compressing data into variable-size blocks and combining them into full stripes that are written to disks. It then uses SSDs to cache active data to achieve high read performance. CASL’s variable block sizes enable the system to be tuned for different applications, to support various compression algorithms and to allow each block to store additional metadata, such as checksums to detect bit errors. The product line known as the CS-Series is addressing the midmarket’s need to modernize its storage infrastructure, and its backup and disaster recovery process.
The CS-Series offers in-line compression (which applies to primary data and local and replicated snapshots), thin provisioning, highly efficient snapshots, flexible replication and cloning tools, as well as data protection policies and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 6.
Where Are They Now?: When Gartner profiled Nimble Storage in early 2011, it had less than $10 million in revenue and the product was barely six months old. Nimble has since expanded the product line with new entry-level and high-end models, and significantly grown the revenue and customer footprint. Nimble Storage now boasts an annual bookings run rate in their latest fiscal year of more than $100 million and more than 1,250 customers worldwide,
making it one of the fastest-growing storage startups. Employee count has increased from less than 50 people in early 2011 to close to 400 employees today. From starting as a U.S.-centric company, Nimble Storage has expanded its direct and indirect footprint in EMEA and Asia/Pacific, with close to 15% of annual revenue coming from outside the U.S. Nimble Storage is planning for an initial public offering (IPO) in late 2013 or early 2014 to raise more capital for business expansion. Nimble has also forged close partnerships with vendors such as Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and CommVault to expand its addressable use cases by tackling a variety of workloads such as VDI, Exchange, SharePoint and Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.
Despite this tremendous growth, Nimble still faces significant challenges. Apart from viability concerns that most startup vendors encounter, Nimble’s product line is still narrowly focused on a few use cases and there is still work to be done in bridging the channel and ISV partnership gaps. Additionally, Nimble is focused only on iSCSI protocol, when growth in NAS is far outstripping the growth in storage area networks (SANs).
Who Should Care: Midsize organizations looking for flash-optimized storage for workloads such as Oracle Database, SQL Server database, SharePoint and VDI should include Nimble Storage in their shortlist. Nimble’s products offer the promise of eliminating the complexity of managing separate primary, backup and disaster recovery processes and infrastructures while delivering performance enhancements based on a flash-optimized architecture.
StorSimple
Santa Clara, CA (www.storsimple.com) Analysis by Arun Chandrasekaran and Stanley Zaffos
Why Cool Then: StorSimple Cloud Storage Controller is an IP storage gateway that behaves as an iSCSI storage system that uses public cloud storage as a storage tier. Instead of destaging data from cache to back-end storage, it destages data into the cloud after it deduplicates and encrypts the data. From a storage perspective, it is a disaggregated system with everything but back-end storage in the appliance. From a network perspective, it is a WAN optimization controller (WOC) supporting public or private cloud-distributed storage.
Internally, the StorSimple Storage Controller uses a weighted storage layout approach, data is broken into “chunks” that are analyzed and weighted based on frequency of use. SSD capacity is split between a linear store and a deduplicated store. Data in the linear store is not deduplicated and holds the hottest data. The deduplicated store, as its name suggests, holds deduplicated but unencrypted data and is used to expand the usable capacity of the controller. When working, set management algorithms determine that data should be destaged to the cloud, it is encrypted and then moved from SSD and SAS layers to low-cost cloud storage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Windows Azure. StorSimple provides block-level snapshots, enabling recovery point objectives and backups not generally associated with a cloud IaaS infrastructure. Although there were numerous startups that were developing similar on-site/cloud hybrid storage approaches, StorSimple was the first developer to optimize for specific applications with iSCSI access.
Where Are They Now?: Microsoft acquired StorSimple for an undisclosed sum in November 2012, validating StorSimple’s innovative cloud-integrated storage strategy. Microsoft’s underlying intention is to make hybrid cloud storage a reality for its enterprise and midmarket customers through a combination of physical and virtual on-premises appliances. The acquisition gives Microsoft a significant advantage over competitors such as Amazon Web Services, AT&T and Rackspace in targeting Microsoft workloads such as SharePoint and SQL Server.
Since the acquisition, Microsoft has doubled the engineering team at StorSimple and significantly expanded its global reach beyond North America, with the product now being available in more than 25 countries. The acquisition has also helped StorSimple to rapidly expand its customer base due to tight integration and joint go-to-market with Windows Azure for enterprise workloads such as SharePoint.
Although post acquisition, Microsoft had indicated that it had no plan to change the existing integration with other cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace, we recommend that customers should get clear direction from Microsoft on its long-term support plans and feature availability for non-Microsoft clouds.
Who Should Care: VPs and directors of IT, storage, and infrastructure of midsize companies and enterprises planning a cost-effective hybrid cloud storage environment with iSCSI access for primary storage, backup or archiving use cases should consider StorSimple.
Source: Gartner Research, G00250240, Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekaran, Gene Ruth, Joseph Unsworth, John Monroe, Pushan Rinnen, Alan Dayley, Stanley Zaffos, 22 April 2013
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Pure Storage, Inc.
Twitter: @purestorage 650 Castro Street, Suite #400 Mountain View, CA 94041 T: 650-290-6088 F: 650-625-9667 Sales: [email protected] Support: [email protected] Media: [email protected] General: [email protected]
