Assessment of Automated Tiered Storage for Midrange Arrays
From Wikibon
Originating Authors: David Floyer and Nick Allen
In December 2011, Wikibon published research on Automated Tiered Storage (ATS) for Higher-end storage arrays, and concluded that ATS was cost-justified (reduced storage costs by about 25%) and ready for “prime time”. Wikibon found that a key element in the higher-end arrays was control over the environment. Most users, supported by early user experience, were not ready to allow the mission critical applications to be managed by a “black box”.
This follow-on research extends the original research to the midrange marketplace. Automation is more important for this market segment, and Wikibon
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Executive Summary
Storage Arrays Analysed
Wikibon picked the single most popular platform from each of the major platforms to analyze. The intial list was:
- Dell Compellent using Data Progression
- EMC VNX using FAST VP ATS together with FastCache software
- Hitachi AMS
- Hitachi VSP using Dynamic Tiering ATS software
- HP 3PAR F-Class using Adaptive Optimization ATS software
- IBM Storwize 7000 using Easy Tier ATS software
- IBM XIV
- NetApp FAS Series
Three arrays were not analyzed because they did not offer an ATS solution. They were:
- Hitachi AMS
- Hitachi HUS system – this array family is new into the marketplace. Tiered storage is offered for file-based storage, but not initially for block-based storage. Wikibon expects ATS block-based storage solutions to be available in the future, and hopes to analyze them in the future.
- IBM XIV (Flash can act as a read-only cache. The fundamental architecture of the VIV which spreads two copies of data across all drives only allows a single tier of storage.)
- NetApp FAS Series (Flash acts as a read-only cache. NetApp offer manual movement of data between tiers, but have been resistant to providing an automated tiered storage solution)
The Hitachi VSP and IBM Storwize 7000 were analyzed in the previous research. This time the weightings and the comparison categories and questions were all slightly different.
Methodology
Action Item:
Footnotes:
Footnote 1: This table is the source data for Figure 1. The data is as of May 2012, and is the result of detailed analysis performed by Wikibon analysts. The scope of the analysis is the available (GA) sub-LUN ATS software alone, and does not include other vendor or third-party software. The questions were designed to be Y/N questions, with the exceptions of questions on GUI quality and data locking (1-3 scale), and questions on references and quality of documentation (both 1-5 scales). These scores translate into 1 for a "Y", and 0 for a "N" for Y/N questions, and a linear scale for the scale questions where the lowest score is 0 and the highest score is 1. The average weighted score within each the main evaluation criteria is calculated relative the maximum total score shown in Table 1. These scores are shown in the table at the bottom of figure 1, together with the overall total across all the criteria.
Source: Wikibon 2012
