iSCSI SAN Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide – DCIG

Here is an abstract of the report 2016-17 iSCSI SAN Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide, written by Tim Anderson and Ken Clipperton, managing analysts, and Jerome Wendt, president, lead analyst, DCIG, LLC.

Introduction
Over the years organizations have taken a number of steps to better manage the data that they already possess as well as prepare themselves for the growth they expect to experience in the future. These steps usually involve either deleting data that they have determined they do not need or should not keep while archiving the rest of it on a low cost media such as optical, tape or even with public cloud storage providers.

Yet many if not most organizations still adhere to a ‘keep it all forever’ mentality when it comes to managing data for various reasons. Many do not have the resources or time to effectively and thoughtfully manage their data to the point where they can confidently delete their unneeded or unwanted data. Others have serious concerns about purposefully deleting data fearing that such a decision will someday come back to haunt them. Still others want to keep their data in case they identify some yet to-be-determined business requirement where that data is needed.

These factors have led organizations to adopt a ‘delete nothing’ approach to managing their data as this is often their most affordable and prudent option. The challenge with this technique is that as data volumes continue to grow and retention periods remain non-existent, organizations need to identify solutions on which they can affordably store all of this data on a media on which they can easily access it. Further, many want to keep at least a copy of this data on premise as opposed to storing it off premise with cloud providers where the data security and/or speed of accessibility may be in doubt.

Thanks to the continuing drop per gigabyte in disk’s cost that day has essentially arrived. The emergence of highly available and reliable iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays that scale into the petabytes at a cost of well below $1/GB opens the doors for organizations to confidently and cost-effectively keep almost any amount of data online and accessible for their business needs.

iSCSI SAN storage arrays configured as utility storage arrays represent a maturation of the storage array market. Storage arrays using HDDs are still the predominant media used to host and service high performance applications. But with the advent of flash and SSDs, hybrid and all-flash arrays that use these technologies are rapidly supplanting all-HDD storage arrays to host business-critical, performance sensitive applications as all-flash and hybrid arrays can typically provide sub-two millisecond read and write response times.

However the high levels of performance these flash-based arrays offer comes with a price – up to 10x more than HDD-based iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays. This is where HDD-based iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays are finding a new home as they are re-purposed to host and service applications with infrequently accessed or inactive data such as archived, backup and file data.

Further, iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays still offer low millisecond response times (8-10 ms) for application reads and writes which is more than adequate for archival or infrequently accessed data. These arrays deliver millisecond response times while supporting hundreds of terabytes if not petabytes of storage capacity at under a dollar per gigabyte.

This combination of price and performance explains, in part, why IDC recently forecast that the utility storage array market will grow at a 26.4% CAGR to $41.5 billion through 2018, or about six times the growth rate of the overall information technology market.

The price points of iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays make it practical for organizations to keep more data for ever longer periods even as they lower their overall costs and management overhead. By storing archival, backup and/or infrequently accessed data on these arrays, they have more flexibility and budget to introduce hybrid or all-flash arrays into their environment to host their more active, performance sensitive data on them.

Storing archival, backup or infrequently data on lower cost iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays also serves to minimize the risk, time, uncertainty and need to differentiate between which data they should keep or delete. Using iSCSI SAN utility storage arrays organizations get new options to keep their data indefinitely while minimizing the costs, time and overhead associated with doing so.

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