New platforms put all storage protocols and data formats in one box.

Storage remains one of today’s significant infrastructure problems due to continually escalating data growth rates. Annual data growth rates now exceed 60 percent in most organizations, with rates upward of 150 percent not particularly uncommon in larger enterprises.

Organizations use a variety of complex applications to achieve their business requirements — applications that generate increasing amounts of structured and unstructured data, each with different data protection requirements and data recovery objectives. As a result, CIOs have been left to sift hope from hype while choosing from a broad array of technology solutions to meet diverse storage needs. Should it be direct-attached storage or networked? SAN or NAS? Fibre Channel or iSCSI?

The continued development of unified storage solutions could make the evaluation of competing technologies a somewhat hollow debate, however. A unified storage architecture supports Fibre Channel SAN, IP-based SAN (iSCSI) and NAS, while consolidating file-based and block-based data access in a single storage platform.

Getting Together
NAS devices have traditionally been implemented as general-purpose file servers — relatively simple plug-and-play appliances that move data in formatted files. SANs, meanwhile, dominated the networked storage market due to their ability to rapidly move data in unformatted blocks among multiple hosts with multiple storage systems.

For years, there was heated debate about whether NAS or SAN was the better approach to networked storage. In truth, both play essential roles. Almost all organizations these days must deal with significant amounts of both file-based data (spreadsheets, text documents, video and audio files) and block-based data (relational databases and data warehouse stores).

Many midsize and large enterprises have deployed both SAN and NAS and are struggling to regain control of their storage infrastructures. Smaller organizations with growing storage needs want to take advantage of SANs without eliminating their NAS investments. Each of these organizations wants SAN and NAS to work together in a seamlessly integrated environment — and unified storage is designed to bridge this gap.

The Road to Unification
Unified storage is an evolving technology, but not a new technology. A variety of vendors have taken stabs at providing block-oriented and file-oriented storage in a single box since the late 1990s. Some of the earliest attempts involved simply putting two machines together in a single enclosure and then creating a GUI to handle management of both.

Next came NAS gateways, which used a NAS box as an entry to SAN storage. In this setup, a NAS box provides file-based access to applications via a LAN port, and then stores the data on a block-oriented storage array that can be accessed across the SAN. While this approach accommodates both block and file protocols, it has some disadvantages. One of the major problems is that data must be transferred twice — once across the NAS Ethernet connection and again across the Fibre Channel or IP SAN — which adds to I/O latency. Another issue is that the management of NAS gateways continues to be separate from the management of SAN arrays.

More recent unified storage platforms leverage virtualization technology to offer a much deeper integration. A file system performs I/O to disk blocks using a common virtualized disk-volume engine. Virtualization allows administrators to create a seamless pool of unified storage and enables transparent data migration and movement for tiered storage.

A number of vendors — including Network Appliance, Reldata, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM — offer unified storage solutions. Many of these solutions include features such as data replication, incremental snapshots and remote mirroring that contribute to robust business continuity capabilities.

Many Benefits
Cost savings is a primary driver behind unified storage deployments. It cuts capital expenditures by reducing hardware and data center real estate requirements. Managing fewer storage targets also reduces operating expenses for administration, maintenance, power and cooling.

Unified storage helps put the brakes on the ever-rising costs associated with digital asset storage, management and delivery. It provides a means for consolidating various storage resources into a larger pool and delivering scalable high-performance file services over the TCP/IP LAN. In addition, having all data available in one pool simplifies backup and business continuity planning.

In the long run, the chief benefit of unified storage may be that it finally ends the ongoing debate about which storage technologies are most appropriate for the data center. By supporting multiple protocols and all the essential transport mechanisms, a unified storage platform allows administrators to focus on application requirements rather than technology, while ensuring that the organization’s storage network will be capable of seamlessly supporting its long-term storage needs.

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