The Economics of Scale-Out Storage

By Sam Charrington

Sponsored by

CloudPulse Strategies

http://cloudpul.se

Table of Contents

Executive Summary Introduction Capital Costs Operational Costs Maintenance Costs Strategic Factors Summary Sponsor Profile: Red Hat Storage

3 4 5 7 8 9 10 11

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Executive Summary
Scale-out storage technologies have rapidly gained popularity over the past several years, successfully crossing the chasm from niche technology to mainstream enterprise solution. As this shift occurs, an increasing number of enterprises are seeking to understand the advantages of the newer technology when it comes to the storage of exploding amounts of unstructured data. While many sources have investigated the advantages of scale-out storage from a technology perspective, few have taken on this challenge with a focus on economics. This is unfortunate, as a key environmental factor shaping storage decisions today is the turbulent global economy. With recession just behind us, and growth stalled in many sectors, IT executives continue to be asked to do even more with even fewer resources. Exploring the economic advantages of scale-out storage is the focus of this paper. After briefly defining scale-out storage we discuss, in turn, the capital, operational and strategic advantages of scale-out storage solutions. Because the decision to adopt scale-out storage is most often made in light of the traditional NAS solutions already deployed within the enterprise, we focus on the relative merits of these two technologies throughout our analysis. We conclude that the attention currently garnered by scale-out storage is not misplaced, as it offers significant economic advantages relative to traditional NAS technologies.

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Introduction
Todays enterprise faces a myriad of choices when selecting storage technologies. For a large and quickly growing segment of storage applications those characterized by the need to reliably store large volumes of unstructured data an increasing number of enterprises are turning to scale-out storage technologies. The defining characteristic of scale-out storage is the fact a single scale-out storage system is composed of many independent server nodes forming a loosely coupled distributed storage system. Thus, scale-out refers to the idea that the capacity and performance of the system may be increased by scaling it out, that is, by adding additional nodes. This is in contrast to traditional, monolithic NAS storage, in which each storage device is delivered as a self-contained (and typically proprietary) appliance. Capacity is added to traditional NAS devices by scaling them up, or adding additional resources,such as disk, within the device itself. The software that creates the scale-out storage environment virtualizes the disks of the individual servers into a single global storage pool, simplifying access and management. Because each of the nodes in a scale-out storage system brings with it a balanced set of CPU, memory, disk and network interfaces, scale-out systems are known for their ability to scale linearly, without degrading performance as incremental nodes are added. The enhanced scalability and performance of scale-out storage relative to traditional NAS led to the technologys early adoption as a solution for extreme-scale applications such as high-performance computing and video serving. However, as scale-out offerings have matured and enterprise storage requirements have exploded, the technology is seeing mainstream adoption for a wide variety of applications. This broader interest in scale-out storage is not being driven by its performance characteristics as much as the outstanding economics offered by the technology. In the next section, we begin our exploration of the economics of scale-out storage with a look at the capital cost implications of the technology.

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Capital Costs
Because capital costs are one-time expenses incurred on the purchase of hardware and software, they are the easiest to identify and control. Scale-out storage has numerous capital cost advantages relative to traditional NAS. We explore some of the main ones here.

Commodity vs. Proprietary Pricing

Scale-out storage environments are built using off-the-shelf servers and disk, while traditional NAS is typically based on proprietary hardware components. This has significant cost implications, as the cost of commodity components is driven ever downward by marketplace pressures, while vendors of proprietary systems fight to retain the premium they place on their offerings. The result is that commodity and proprietary systems exist on wholly separate pricing curves, as depicted in Figure 1. At any given point in time, the distance between the commodity and proprietary curves is the savings to be had by choosing the commodity option.

Figure 1.
Server Pricing vs. Time
The cost of commodity components is driven ever downward by marketplace pressures, while vendors of proprietary systems fight to retain the premium they place on their offerings.

PRICE ($)

SAVINGS

TIME
Proprietary Hardware Commodity Hardware

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Incremental vs. Up-Front Investment

Because a scale-out storage system is easily scaled by adding new nodes, its users can start small and grow capacity over time. This helps align storage investments to the needs of the business. Traditional NAS systems allow users to scale-up, but require that users invest up-front in expensive chassis hardware appropriate for their eventual level of scale. These steep up-front investments encourage over-provisioning and can be particularly wasteful if it takes longer than expected to reach capacity targets.

Cloud Deployment
Cloud computing allows users to rent compute and storage resources from third-party cloud providers, and has become a popular strategy for reducing capital expenditures. Software-based scale-out storage is easily deployed in cloud computing environments,without requiring changes to applications. Scale-out storage running in the cloud is thus an effective way to completely eliminate the capital costs associated with traditional NAS storage.

Hardware Repurposing
Software-based scale-out storage allows enterprises to repurpose existing hardware resources and thus defer new capital expenses. As organizations adopt virtualization to consolidate the IT footprint, decommissioned application servers can be added to new or existing storage environments.

Cost of High Availability

Achieving high availability can be much more cost effective in a scale-out storage environment where the software ensures high availability and the failure of any individual machine does not compromise access to data or the systems overall availability. This smaller unit of fail means that less capacity must be kept in reserve for scale-out storage. This is in contrast to monolithic NAS, where entire storage chassis are typically replicated for critical applications and held in reserve in case of failure.

One-size Fits All vs. Fits Like a Glove

The reality of modern storage systems is that different applications have different hardware requirements so, for example, a document serving application has very

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different needs than a video serving application. Scale-out storage allows users to customize the hardware architecture to meet unique requirements, as opposed to being limited to the handful of alternatives offered by the traditional NAS vendor. By empowering users to select and deploy the exact hardware that meets the needs of their application, software-based scale-out storage creates additional opportunities for capital cost savings. Having considered a variety of ways that enterprises can reduce capital costs with scale-out storage, we now turn our attention to the operational cost advantages of scale-out storage solutions.

Operational Costs
Due to their ongoing nature, operational expenses can be even more important to manage than capital costs. At the same time, operational costs can be more difficult to pin down due to their soft nature. In this section we discuss some of the main operational advantages of scale-out storage as compared to traditional NAS.

Scale, Virtualization and the Operational Cost Curve

A key operational characteristic of scale-out storage is the ability to unify disparate servers and their disks into a single global name space. By virtualizing the underlying storage infrastructure and automating its management, scale-out storage decouples management costs from the size and scale of the physical storage system, as depicted in Figure 2. This is in contrast to monolithic NAS, in which each appliance is individually managed and where operational costs rise proportionally to the size and scale of the storage environment.

Automation and Data Availability

Ensuring high levels of data availability can be a perpetual challenge for administrators of traditional storage technologies such as monolithic NAS. Beyond the additional capital expense required for hot/warm/cold standby systems, keeping operational procedures fresh and ready for use when disaster strikes can require a significant investment of both resources and mindshare. With scale-out storage on the other hand, characteristics such as high availability and disaster recovery are inherent to the storage platform. In scale-out environments, data availability is ensured via automated local and

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Figure 2.
Operational Costs vs. Scale
By virtualizing the underlying storage infrastructure and automating its management, scale-out storage decouples management costs from the size and scale of the physical storage system, while each additional scaleup storage server adds to management complexity.

OPERATIONAL COST ($)

SCALE (# SERVERS)
Traditional NAS Scale-out Storage

remote replication, and happens transparently according to policies set by the user.

Maintenance Costs
Hardware and software maintenance costs, while not operating costs per se, can be a significant component of the overall operational costs and total cost of ownership (TCO) of a storage environment and must figure into any economic analysis of storage options. Organizations weighing scale-out storage against traditional NAS must compare the ongoing maintenance costs of the former, typically support and maintenance on commodity servers plus any software subscription costs, against that of the latter, typically a significant percentage of the capital investment in storage hardware. Taken together, the capital and operational cost advantages of scale-out storage are substantial. While these factors will form the basis of any financial assessment of storage options, in the next section we consider a few of the many strategic considerations that impact the storage decision.

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Strategic Factors
The capital and operational cost factors weve examined thus far can unlock significant savings, however the strategic factors we discuss in this section are where an enterprise gains the opportunity to drive revenue, achieve greater agility, and transform the way it and its industry does business.

Business Agility
In previous sections we have explored the cost savings made possible by scale-out storages ability to scale up and down in response to an organizations needs. Yet cost savings isnt the end of the story. There is a strategic advantage to be found in scale-out storage in that it enables high levels of business agility. By forming a single, unified, highly elastic storage pool that is compatible with a wide variety of applications, businesses become positioned to innovate quickly and respond to marketplace shifts without the burden of establishing a new storage environment for each new initiative. Furthermore, enterprises deploying scale-out storage are positioned to unify access to data from many sources and make that data broadly accessible to a wide variety of applications and users, fostering high levels of insight and responsiveness within the enterprise.

Cloud Readiness
The shift towards cloud computing has many implications for storage. While there remain impediments to wholesale migration of enterprise systems to the public cloud, these barriers are lowered every day. As a result, it is imperative that enterprises develop a cloud strategy and consider the cloud-friendliness of each incremental investment. Scale-out storage, due to its software-based nature, easily supports cloudbased deployment. Users are able to readily migrate scale-out storage instances to cloud computing environments in order to increase or augment capacity or reduce costs without rewriting applications or needing to learn a new system. As a result, scale-out storage users are able to more readily take advantage of cloud computing than users of hardware-based NAS systems.

Big Data
Increasingly, enterprises are seeking to gain competitive advantage by harnessing the large volumes of data at their disposal. This big data

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presents critical scalability and performance challenges to monolithic NAS storage architectures, which, due to their design, are unable to scale linearly to large volumes without sacrificing system performance. Because scale-out storage is designed from the ground up to deliver consistent performance as the storage system scales, it is particularly well suited for big data use cases.

Summary
Scale-out storage is an emerging category of networked storage technology that is increasingly finding itself into enterprise data centers and clouds. In this paper, we have shown that the rapid growth in scale-out storage popularity is grounded in solid economic arguments. Scale-out storage offers compelling capital and operational cost advantages relative to traditional NAS appliances. In addition, by allowing enterprises to be more nimble, and to more easily take advantage of cloud computing and big data, scale-out NAS offers a host of strategic advantages that can significantly contribute to overall enterprise competitiveness.

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Sponsor Profile:

Red Hat Storage

Red Hat Storage was created with the belief that deploying scalable, flexible enterprise storage shouldnt lock you in to high-cost proprietary solutions. Achieve the storage per formance, capacity, and availability you need to meet your most demanding enterprise storage requirements with Red Hats scalable, software-only storage Red Hat Storage

Storage
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Red Hat software + x86 commodity hardware

Red Hat Storage combines reliable Red Hat software with x86 commodity hardware, eliminating the need for high-cost proprietary storage systems. No more lock-in. Better return on your investment. And you can deploy exactly what you need, when you need it.

Scale-out NAS
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Copyright 2012 CloudPulse Strategies, LLC. All rights reserved. CloudPulse is a trademark of CloudPulse Strategies, LLC. Red Hat and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. For more information, visit CloudPulse Strategies on the web at http://cloudpul.se, or email info@cloudpul.se. CloudPulse Strategies The Economics of Scale-Out Storage | 11