For Midrange SAN Users, Storage Challenges Remain in Quest for Performance, Efficiency

Midrange Fibre Channel SAN users continue to face challenges optimizing for performance and efficiency according to a recent third-party survey conducted on behalf of Dataram Corporation.

To drive greater performance from an existing midrange Fibre Channel SAN, nearly half of respondents (48 percent) add more storage and/or spindles, which adds to the overall cost and complexity of the system. While 45 percent report they are considering solid state for improved performance and efficiency, less than 15 percent have implemented a solid state solution.

Adding storage systems and/or spindles to solve IO performance bottlenecks is a well accepted practice, but the acquisition costs can be significant. Add in the cost of power, cooling, rack space, management, maintenance, loss of capacity due to underutilization, and the true costs of adding storage systems and/or spindles becomes prohibitive, especially when considering cost per IOPS.  

"When cost per IOPS is considered, solid state solutions make much more economic sense, which is why such a large number of respondents are considering solid state," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram’s Chief Technologist. "The fact that only 15% of respondents have deployed solid state indicates that there is plenty of room for growth in this market, and that users will have increasing options when it comes time to deploy a solution. When considering those options, it is important to consider solutions which are highly available, cost effective, and do not require a major upgrade to deploy. The XcelaSAN solution meets all those requirements."

Dataram’s XcelaSAN is an intelligent, block level Fibre Channel storage optimization appliance. It improves SAN IOPS performance up to 30 times while reducing cost. Storage utilization improves in data center environments when XcelaSAN is installed since customers can use more of the available installed capacity. Critical and sensitive application data is protected by the integrated mirroring function with no single point of failure.