Ready for unification?

There has been significant hype this year around the introduction and implementation of unified storage, with the suggestion that it is the way forward for all. While I accept that the vision of a unified and converged storage architecture is the ultimate goal and a highly sought-after ideal, what needs to be understood is that current products in reality do not meet the promise of a complete unified storage offering.

There has been an unnerving trend by market players to pitch unified solutions in opposition to a traditional point or specialised offering that has been methodically sized to deliver specific customer or application needs.

I suspect this is more of a sales tactic than a technical solution; while there is a niche being carved for these one-size-fits-all offerings in the low-cost cloud and small business markets, they unfortunately do not yet meet all the requirements they could or should.

The needs of the enterprise data centre are simple and straightforward. They should be addressed absolutely if any business is to take a leap of faith and use a single unified storage repository for all the diverse requirements of the modern data centre.

A unified repository should provide easy-to-manage capacity with simple toolsets that increasingly automate provisioning.

This is a key requirement and this functionality should be thoroughly tested when looking at unified offerings, because if the deployment and reprovisioning of the company's storage becomes complex or cumbersome, unified storage would then be more of a hindrance than a solution.

Performance when and where required:

Applications in the data centre have varying performance needs, and certain systems will fail if the relevant performance level cannot be delivered and maintained when required.

The onus is on users to make sure the unified system guarantees a quality of service to key applications and environment.

There is still a long way to go before they can provide the utopia of a single storage platform for all needs.

Adam Day is product manager at SYSDBA.

Mixed workloads can bring a storage system to its knees and precipitate disastrous consequences if critical systems crash. If the crucial criteria of simple management and provisioning have not been met, and a quality of service issue occurs, solving the problem may be impossible without the introduction of new resources or the use of highly skilled professionals to performance-tune the solution.

The need to resort to these measures defeats the reasoning behind a unified repository as it will incur expenses, whether in the procurement of hardware or the exorbitant costs of a vendor's professional services team, which is brought in to solve the problem.

Lastly, availability should be a key feature of a unified platform. The logic behind the unification of storage being a single platform to meet all needs means it would therefore be catastrophic to the continuity of the business if this platform were compromised.

Failure within a unified platform would affect the entire organisation's infrastructure and ability to deliver. As such, it is key that a unified storage platform is built on an enterprise architecture designed from the ground up to tolerate system failures and do so with minimal impact.

Businesses would be forgiven for believing that all storage meets these requirements, as “five 9s” availability has been a must-have feature for many years. However, if the architecture is investigated, it will be found that failure of a single component can have catastrophic effects, and it is complex and time-consuming to return to a level parity.

In terms of the unified storage offerings at present, I believe there is still a long way to go before they can provide the utopia of a single storage platform for all needs.

There is major technology convergence that must still occur. While these advances are happening every day and technologies such as interconnects are progressing to a single form factor, the reality is developments such as converged networks do not yet offer the level of availability and performance that critical applications require. SCSI, a communication protocol commonly used in enterprise applications, is still a lossless high performance communication protocol.

Technology is improving rapidly, however, and as standards become widely adopted, it may not be far from a signal network with advanced automation using next-generation storage technologies. This would allow unified platforms to flourish, making storage unification and convergence a reality.

The truth is that, for now, unified storage is far from perfect and offerings that claim to be all things to all men should be viewed with caution.

At the very least, a substantial amount of testing should follow any decision on these offerings - in my opinion, these solutions should be deployed in low risk, low performance environments where the impact will be minimised should they not fulfil expectations.