Managing the information that drives the enterprise. Storage NAS: Your options

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1 searchstorage.co.uk Storage essential guide Managing the information that drives the enterprise : Your options systems range from standalone desktop boxes to huge clusters that scale for capacity and performance and deliver billions of files from parallel file systems. Find out what you need in our top-to-bottom guide to the market. also: what the future holds for nas vs

2 editorial * antony adshead The present market: What does it hold for the future? Let s look at the market to see what type of is right for you, and how that will change in the coming years. Future of vs This Essential Guide is a great starting point for evaluating the market and deciding what type of is right for you. I ll run through the key areas we cover and suggest some technology changes I think we ll see in the coming years. In this guide we divide the market into three key levels. Firstly, there is the high-end market. This is characterised by the use of scale-out or clustered systems. These stretch to capacities in the tens of petabytes with massive throughput levels and parallel file systems that provide access to all files on all connected device nodes in the cluster. Crucially also, adding nodes adds processing power and/or disk capacity. This end of the market is driven by the need to store huge amounts of files, including virtual machine images, as well as the need for rapid access that multiplies to IOPS rates in the hundreds of thousands per second 2 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

3 Future of vs Vendors often include advanced features such as forms of replication and block access via iscsi. as nodes are added. Next are the entry-level and medium-sized traditional products. These can run to capacities of several hundred terabytes but do not have scale-out capabilities, so there s the risk of running up against the limits of processing power or memory; the file systems of these arrays typically don t span multiple units so you may end up with siloed file systems in each device. That said, there s a healthy midmarket and vendors often include advanced features such as forms of replication and block access via iscsi, which effectively makes many of these products multiprotocol storage. Finally, there is desktop, which is really just the smallest capacity and performance end of the traditional market. These devices are aimed at small businesses and larger ones that need local storage in an office or remote location. And here again vendors are providing features that were once only found in enterprise devices. Also, strictly speaking, part of the world is HPC (high-performance computing) storage, which also deals in very large amounts of files and extremely high performance but that s outside the scope of this guide. You can read about it here though. Those are pretty much the main contours of technology at present, with two things that stand out that indicate future directions of development. The first is rise of scale-out capability, which is something that ought to become commonplace in devices at all levels of the market. There seem to me to be good reasons to do so. Even if customers aren t demanding it yet, it should be a selling point for vendors. After all, scale-out capabilities allow customers to add 3 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

4 Future of vs further units that build capacity and performance, while simultaneously providing an easier-to-manage cluster of file storage rather than a collection of siloed devices, each requiring individual administrative attention. At present it s only the high end that does scale-out, but it s a feature built into controller operating systems that should be portable to devices down the range. If I was a customer for midrange I d want to know why I wasn t being allowed to build on my investment as I added further hardware from a vendor to my estate. The second thing is the likely development of cleverer ways of providing better performance. At present performance is largely enhanced by buying bigger trad boxes or adding processing power and throughput with the addition of nodes in clustered configurations. But, there may well be more efficient ways to speed access times and throughput rates. In the SAN world we re seeing some newcomers do interesting things that combine flash, spinning disk and sometimes data deduplication. The principle here is to put the most used data on the fastest storage media and shift data between those different tiers; Tintri, NexGen and Nutanix do this, for example. NetApp applied the idea of using a flash cache for the most used data in a filer some time ago. Now Avere has taken that principle and applied flash caching to hot data across numerous devices. It s a fairly lonely furrow, but it could be a taste of things to come. n Antony Adshead is bureau chief of SearchStorage.co.UK. 4 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

5 Product roundup: meets unstructured data challenge We examine how scale-out products from EMC Isilon and NetApp have been updated since last year and delve into other vendors that offer products in that space. by Chris Evans Future of vs In 2011, SearchStorage.co.UK looked at the scale-out market and how the major players are implementing that technology. Products from EMC Isilon and NetApp have been updated since then and other companies now offer products in the scale-out space: HDS/BlueArc, Avere, Panasas and Oracle. EMC enhanced its Isilon scale-out platform with 3 TB enterprise-class hard drives and now provides up to 15 PB of capacity in a single Isilon file system. And in June 2011, EMC Isilon announced it had submitted benchmark tests to the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC) that demonstrated NFS performance of 1.1 million IOPS and CIFS performance of 1.6 million IOPS. The configuration was based on a 140-node cluster of Isilon S200 arrays with 864 TB of storage. Not to be outdone, NetApp followed up in early November of 5 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

6 2011 by submitting a benchmark test to SPEC with a 24-node cluster deployment of FAS6240 arrays in Data Ontap 8 Cluster Mode with 1.51 million IOPS. This performance was achieved with only 574 TB of storage capacity. For some vendors, being the fastest seems to be important to demonstrate their scalability credentials. Since then, however, Avere said it has leapfrogged NetApp with a result of 1.56 million IOPS on the same SPEC test. NetApp has also upgraded Data Ontap to Version 8.1. This has added a number of storage efficiency features to Data Ontap s cluster mode, including block-level deduplication, flash cache, cloning and SnapMirror asynchronous mirroring. block access has also been added, but the fundamental issues with Net- App s scale-out model that limit its file system size have not been addressed. Users must also still decide between Version 8.1 or socalled 7-mode ie, non-clustered at install. Future of vs BlueArc Set for a Market Boost from HDS BlueArc was founded in 1998 in the UK. Hitachi Data Systems has sold BlueArc through an OEM deal since 2006, and it acquired BlueArc in September 2011 for $600 million. BlueArc takes a different approach to high-performance scale-out by using dedicated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) within its architecture to deliver very high scalability and capacity within a single node. Unlike commodity CPUs, FPGAs are customisable to specific tasks and can be configured to run different processes concurrently. BlueArc s Titan Series can scale to 16 PB within a single namespace, with 20 Gbps performance in an eight-node cluster. The use of dedicated hardware chips differentiates BlueArc from other vendors in the market today. Most manufacturers have chosen to build their solutions using commodity hardware components, such as Intel Xeon processors. Now that HDS owns BlueArc, industry observers expect it to 6 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

7 accelerate its sales and the development of technology by adding more resources than BlueArc could afford as an independent company. Future of vs Avere Systems Speeds up Existing Farms Avere Systems attacks the scale-out market from a different angle. It produces a series of storage appliances that accelerate the performance of existing deployments within an organisation. Avere s FXT-series appliances use DRAM, NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) and either solid-state drives or traditional hard disk drives to provide cached access to the most active data within an existing farm. Typically, in many organisations the working set of active data within a cluster can be as low as 10% of overall capacity. So, Avere focuses its appliances at delivering access to that working set, while allowing the majority of the data to sit on cheaper traditional products. Besides delivering a single namespace, Avere FXT appliances can automatically tier data and deliver WAN caching. Organisations that operate from multiple disparate locations, where an appliance provides local access to data, have made use of these appliances. The FXT series can scale to a maximum of 50 nodes, with the high-end FXT 4500 providing 144 GB of DRAM, 2 GB of NVRAM and 3 TB of SSD. Panasas Blade Approach Panasas delivers scale-out using a blade architecture. Its ActiveStor product family consists of director blades that manage file I/O and storage blades that provide storage capacity. As many as 11 blades can be deployed in a single shelf in a number of configura- 7 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

8 tions, depending on the requirements for capacity or performance. A single Panasas namespace can scale to 10 shelves per rack and up to 10 racks. This gives a maximum capacity of 6 PB (using 3 TB drives) with 150 gigabytes per second throughput. Panasas has taken an alternative approach to managing resiliency within its architecture. RAID is implemented at the object level rather than the disk or block of traditional systems. Data is distributed across blades and disks to deliver high resilience. In a failure scenario, data rebuilds occur at the file level, providing faster access to recovered data. Future of vs Oracle s ZFS Scales Hugely Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle offers the Sun ZFS Storage Appliances. These appliances use the ZFS file system. Developed by Sun Microsystems in 2004, ZFS (originally named Zettabyte File System) can scale to a staggering 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage. ZFS uses a combination of traditional storage and flash to deliver high-performance I/O for both read and write data. The high-end Oracle ZFS Storage 7420 array scales to a maximum of 1.15 PB and can be deployed in a clustered configuration. Developed by Sun Microsystems in 2004, ZFS can scale to a staggering 256 quadrillion petabytes. Unstructured data is the fastest-growing type of data, and the pure NFS market will soon be challenged by object storage vendors, who can deliver access to their products via NFS gateways. Object storage arrays already offer higher scalability than and are seen as fundamental building blocks of cloud storage. n Chris Evans is an independent consultant with Langton Blue. 8 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

9 SMB product survey: Non-scale-out/clustered still fills a need, non-scale-out still meets the needs of SMBs despite the rise of clustered alternatives but product categories are becoming blurred with block access. by Martin Taylor Future of vs The market is a truly mature market but is also a rapidly changing one. Its latest iteration, clustered or scale-out which allows the linking of multiple devices under a single file system has risen rapidly to meet organisations needs to store large amounts of unstructured data. But, there is still a need for traditional products to meet the demands of SMB use cases such as small business and departmental/branch office file serving. While higher-end products have gone scale-out/clustered, SMB products have in some cases evolved to offer iscsi and Fibre Channel block access connectivity options in addition to support for traditional NFS and CIFS protocols. In this they have arguably become multiprotocol storage subsystems, though majoring in. Other products have remained true to file access and added performance enhancers such as SSD. 9 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

10 In this article we examine some of the current offerings in the non-scale-out SMB marketplace for low and midrange use cases and its benefits for organisations that want to consolidate storage. Future of vs NetApp. NetApp virtually invented the product space, or at least made itself synonymous with it. Its FAS filer products can be linked together to serve files from multiple nodes, but there are severe limits on this capability, and so it is not a truly scale-out product set. Products start at the entry-level FAS2000 range. The FAS2220, for example, offers 12 onboard disk slots, externally expandable to 60, and a total capacity of 60 TB on either SAS or SATA drives with Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iscsi connectivity as well as NFS and CIFS file access options. The hardware comes bundled with an extensive range of NetApp software, including options for thin provisioning, snapshotting and data deduplication. Dual controllers in the same chassis powered by NetApp Data Ontap provide failover in the event of controller failure. Optional extras can be added, such as remote-volume mirroring. Dual controllers in the same chassis powered by the NetApp Data Ontap operating system provide failover in the event of controller failure. The range extends to include full-scale enterprise systems in the FAS6000 family via the FAS3000 midrange devices. EMC. Last year EMC merged its Celerra and Clariion SAN products into one unified storage line to face NetApp head on. The result was the VNXe product line for smaller businesses; VNX in the midrange; and the VNX Series Gateway, which is a gateway add-on for EMC SANs. 10 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

11 There are two VNXe products that support protocols and iscsi block access. The VNXe3100 is a 2U device with a maximum of 96 SAS or nearline SAS drives, while the VNXe3300 can take 120 drives, including flash. There are five midrange VNX devices: four in the VNX5000 series adn the higher-end VNX7500. All are dual-controller. The VNX5000 series can contain from 75 to inch and 2.5-inch drives, with flash and SAS supported. The top-of-the-range VNX7500 can hold 1,000 drives. Protocols supported are NFS, CIFS, MPFS and pnfs, Fibre Channel, iscsi, and FCoE. The devices also support object storage and have eight to 32 ports. Future of vs HP. HP s X1000 G2 Network Storage System is slightly less feature-rich than NetApp s FAS2000 series and EMC s NX4. Powered by Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, it offers iscsi connectivity and can be managed by HP X1800sb G2 Network Storage Blades. The X1000 has a maximum raw capacity of 24 TB with either SATA or SAS drives. Its feature list also boasts file deduplication, quota management, file screening, reporting, Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshots, Windows Active Directory integration HP s X1000 has a maximum raw capacity of 24 TB with either SATA or SAS drives. and Windows Distributed File System (DFS) Replication. In HP environments, administrators can make use of integration with other HP products, such as the HP BladeSystem. IBM. IBM s N-series system storage range is provided as OEM hardware from NetApp and offers iscsi, and Fibre Channel connectivity. The N3000 Express is the entry-level system of the N series and is presented as a consolidation solution for data formerly held in direct-attached storage (DAS). The rebadged 11 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

12 FAS2020 unit offers SAS or SATA disk types and features the Net- App Data Ontap operating system, which manages thin provisioning and dual-controller options for data protection. This fits into a 24 TB array, which comes as standard with the initial N3000 2U unit. The N series allows interoperability with external storage units and controllers from higher up in the range. The N series is an affordable small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) solution that can be scaled up easily to an enterprise-level array with minimal migration pain. Future of vs Dell. Dell offers a number of and multiprotocol storage product families, including the NX product lines. In the NX series, the entry-level model is the tower-format NX200, which provides capacity of up to 8 TB on four hot-swappable SATA drives. Meanwhile, the NX300 is protocol-only, 1U in size and provides up to 8 TB of internal capacity. The NX3000 and NX3100 offer CIFS and NFS access, with optional iscsi access on the NX3000. Both are in The NX3000 and NX3100 offer CIFS and NFS access, with optional iscsi access on the NX3000. the 2U rack-mount format, with 24 TB of internal capacity on the NX3100 and 12 TB on the NX3000. The new PowerVault NX3600 and NX3610 are 1 GbE and 10 GbE, respectively, with file and block access. The NX3600 scales to 576 TB while a dual NX3610 configuration can go to 1 PB. Nexsan. Like EMC, Nexsan has also followed in the path created by NetApp and launched its own unified storage line, in March The NST-series devices support and iscsi and use SLC flash and DRAM to accelerate performance in the company s FASTier cache feature, introduced with the E5000 series in There are 12 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

13 three products in the NST-series family: the 5100, 5300 and 5500, with maximum capacities of 93 TB, 720 TB and 1 PB, respectively. Built-in SSD capacities are 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB, respectively. Drive types range from 7,200 rpm SATA to 15,000 rpm SAS or SSD. Customers can start with or iscsi access and upgrade to unified storage. Future of vs Overland. The SnapServer range from Overland Storage is set at a similar market level to the HP X1000. It is powered by GuardianOS, developed by Adaptec, from which Overland acquired the SnapServer line in The SnapServer N2000 unit is stackable up to six units with a maximum capacity of 12 drive slots per array. The system supports either SAS or SATA drives and offers NFS and iscsi connectivity options via dual 1 Gbps Ethernet ports. Snapshotting is included via Microsoft Windows VSS. Replication services are an optional extra via the Snap Enterprise Data Replicator add-on. Overland s SnapServer N2000 unit is stackable up to six units with a maximum capacity of 12 drive slots per array. Although not offering the extended capabilities of scale-out, the SMB products here still have an important role to play in SME system environments. systems have evolved from being dedicated NFS/CIFS file serving solutions into products that also offer block-level storage. This extended functionality is now within the reach of SMEs and will allow them to address their data consolidation needs whilst also offering a cost-effective storage platform for virtual server environments. n Martin Taylor is support team leader at Capita Financial Systems. 13 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

14 Clustered vs traditional solutions Compared with traditional, clustered offers file visibility across petabytes of storage and is hugely scalable. Find out more about its advantages. by Martin Glassborow Future of vs Clustered has its roots in the worlds of media and high-performance computing; these two areas have dealt with the problems of operating massively scalable storage solutions for longer than most. solutions still hark back to the earliest days of Auspex Systems and NetApp, where a solution at the very basic level was a server with some disk attached to it. You could add more disk and a more powerful server, but scalability was limited in terms of performance and capacity. solutions essentially comprise a single storage device; more than one of them may be configured in failover cluster, but scalability is limited by the amount of CPU/memory and disk that a single device can make use of. In the case of failover environments, best practice places an upper limit of 50% of each server s individual capacity to provide the space required for failover. By contrast, clustered allows horizontal scaling across a 14 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

15 number of devices with all of them being active and able to see all files in the cluster. This has a number of advantages: If your storage servers become CPU/memory-bound, you can add a device to gain processing power without adding disk. If you run out of storage, you can add disk that all devices can see, but you don t have to purchase additional devices. A device failure is non-disruptive, and the load of the failed unit can be spread across the whole cluster. Future of vs Scalability Benefits The special sauce in the leading clustered products is a distributed file system. This enables all the nodes in a cluster to see all the files in the environment; examples are OneFS from EMC-Isilon, General Parallel File System (GPFS) from IBM and Ibrix Fusion from Hewlett-Packard. This ability to scale performance and capacity requirements independently of each other is an important feature of most clustered solutions. This allows more effective use of resources compared with traditional, as it is no longer necessary to purchase new devices to add capacity or to purchase storage when all that is required is more throughput at the storage server level. Clustered can carry out all traditional file serving requirements in a more scalable manner. For example, SO from IBM starts at 27 TB and could be configured with just a couple of nodes. This would compare very reasonably to a traditional solution. But clustering really comes into its own when you have a rapidly growing estate scaling to many terabytes of storage 15 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

16 Future of with a rapid growth curve and the requirement to grow non-disruptively and with minimal migration effort. In the past if growth required more, you often needed to migrate existing data to the new, larger-capacity device. With clustered the addition of extra capacity and performance does not require a data migration exercise since all storage servers can see all the data. With clustered, the addition of extra capacity and performance does not require a data migration exercise. There s far less effort involved in managing clustered compared with multiple traditional devices, and I have found that with clustered we can manage in excess of 1 petabyte (PB) per full-time equivalent (FTE) employee. Clustered is beginning to make a big impact in large virtualised environments where many thousands of server images along with their data can be stored in a multi-node cluster. EMC s acquisition of Isilon will certainly drive the use of clustering in VMware environments. vs Clustered Vendors With EMC s acquisition of Isilon at the end of 2010, HP s acquisition of Ibrix in 2009 and NetApp s acquisition of Spinnaker in 2003, there are now a number of mature vendors in this space. And Symantec has even waded into the market. The following is a breakdown of these vendors products: EMC. The core of Isilon s product is the OneFS Operating System, which scales performance in a near-linear fashion as more nodes are added, up to a maximum of 144, and can provide a capacity of more than 10 PB in a single file system. 16 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

17 An Isilon cluster can be made up of a number of nodes that provide for IOPS, sequential throughput or capacity, which allows for a great deal of flexibility in configuration. Isilon offers automated storage tiering using an automated policy engine known as SmartPools, which also allows additional nodes to be added and data to be restriped across these nodes non-disruptively. Future of IBM. IBM built its own clustered solution based on its mature GPFS clustered file system and standard Lintel servers; these have been combined to produce SO (Scale Out Network Attached Storage). SO supports billions of files and more than 14 PB of storage in a single file system with up to 30 interface nodes and 30 storage pods able to be configured in a single SO cluster. Different types of disk can be put into different pools with a policy engine used to determine file placement and file migration. The policy engine can restripe data when new nodes are added. Tape can also be fully integrated as an additional pool with Tivoli Storage Manager, providing transparent hierarchical storage management (HSM) capabilities. vs HP. HP bundled the Ibrix software it acquired with its server technology to build the X9000 Network Storage System. This comes in a number of models, including gateways that allow customers to provide their own disk but also fully integrated appliances that contain servers and storage. All models in the X9000 range can be combined into a single file system to provide up to 16 PB of file space. The X9000 supports data tiering that can move data seamlessly and without disruption onto appropriate tiers of storage. NetApp. The results of NetApp s Spinnaker acquisition were realised in the form of the Ontap 8 operating system. Ontap 8 pro- 17 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

18 Future of vides a traditional environment but also can be configured in cluster mode to provide a scale-out environment. This decision must be made at the install of your NetApp appliance, and currently there is no way of migrating between these two modes. Ontap 8 cluster mode allows up to 24 (or 12 pairs) of NetApp filers to be combined into a single cluster. Ontap 8 has probably the least in common architecturally with any of its competitors. Cluster mode only really allows each of the filers to serve one another s file systems via a single service name; there is no single global file system. So although the global namespace could cover the full capacity of all of the filers combined which is currently in excess of 40 PB the individual file systems are limited to 100 TB. This is a serious limitation in the NetApp implementation of clustered as it lacks the elegance of one large file system and will require more work, including an increased data migration workload, to scale environments. n Martin Glassborow is a storage manager with a major UK-based media company and blogs under the name Storagebod. vs 18 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

19 : What it is and what it s good for devices are particularly useful for small offices and branches. In this interview, discover the key characteristics of desktop. by Martin Taylor Future of vs devices offer cheap and easily configurable storage capacity for small-office and branch-office use cases. Usually these devices come with basic RAID data protection and the ability to link to network directories to set security provision. But, what are the limitations of desktop, and how useful is it as a backup target or for primary storage? In this interview, SearchStorage.co.UK Bureau Chief Antony Adshead speaks with Martin Taylor, support team leader at Capita Financial Systems, about the key characteristics of desktop and the use cases it is best suited to. What is desktop and what features and levels of performance are available in this kind of hardware? To start from the base level, we re talking about a small disk array that s capable of RAID striping, generally only two levels, which will be RAID 10 or RAID 5 depending on the resilience that you want, with a native operating system installed on the box that acts as a 19 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

20 Future of vs broker between your clients and the file serving. Quite often, these include things like Active Directory connectors so you can interrogate your AD for security information. The first network-attached storage device I ever worked with was a SnapServer that had something like a 200 file share limit on it, so obviously things have come on a huge amount since then. is basically transparent to users these days. There s very little overhead for talking to your Windows network, and it s a cheap and easy way to store files that require file service access. Obviously, if you buy something with iscsi connectivity you can begin to host applications and databases but for the purposes of this discussion we re talking about file serving. If we re talking about levels of performance in desktop systems, they seem to be either four- or five-drive-capable with Level 10 or Level 5 RAID. This seems to be common for most of the entrylevel devices such as the [Buffalo] TeraStation. It s very easy to configure these devices for users. There are simply drop-down menus and you manage them via a Web interface. They tend to have a broker operating system on them that talks to Windows. This can be Linux-based [although] there are flavours of operating system that come direct from Microsoft that are attached to these devices. Again, the important thing [when configuring these devices for users] is linking into your Active Directory if you ve got that requirement. If [you ve got] a very small office or if you are a home user, you can put this device on your network and point your files at it and off you go; it doesn t require any security configuration. But if [you re in] a small-office enterprise environment where you need to define levels of security access to files, then it s dead easy because there is nothing native on the box and you can do it all through Active Directory. You set file and folder permissions through the interface on the desktop device that are dragged from your AD. 20 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

21 Future of vs What can you use desktop for, and what about its suitability for use for backup or primary storage? In the small-enterprise environment that I m in, desktop is a very cheap and easy way of gaining some space for file archival or archival purposes: stuff you need quick access to [if you re at] a small remote site. Also, image storage is a big thing with us with our large image databases, and we find they re a very cheap way of storing large amounts of images; they are available to users all the time. And there s redundancy in the devices so we don t have to worry about failures, and we get alerts if there is a problem. With the amount of disk space you get and the redundancy, desktop makes sense economically. So, basically, they re great as a bin area for all files that you don t want on levels of expensive storage. It s perfectly possible to drop files down to them off of the SAN as well, when we find it s no longer economic to keep them there for access reasons, etc. But mainly the use for us, at small satellite offices, they re very cheap file storage, even cheaper than Windows storage. When you look at the price of storage on desktop you re looking at something comparable to a single server drive, so with the amount of disk space you get and the redundancy, economically desktop definitely makes sense in the [small-enterprise] environment but it must be used correctly. I certainly wouldn t consider it for live, online storage of files that required a lot of access; that would be more server-based. The other use we find for desktop in our environment is that it s a very cheap way of hosting backup files. Currently, we re using [Symantec] Backup Exec to back up all our stuff and find that desktop is good as a backup to disk device. This is for non-critical backups, incremental, etc. 21 Storage Essential Guide: Your options

22 Obviously, we hive off our full backups off to tape but [the desktop is] great as a transition area, as compared with the cost of storage such as tape the price is very favourable and because it s online all the time, the restore times are quick. Because there aren t any problems getting people to deal with tape loading [at] remote sites, etc, then it s available instantaneously if we have to restore something for users. So as a backup staging area I definitely think they have a good use, and that s the main purpose we use them for other than file storage. n Future of TechTarget Storage Media Group vs SearchStorage.co.UK Editorial Director Rich Castagna UK Bureau Chief Antony Adshead Senior Site Editor Sue Troy Assistant Site Editor Francesca Sales Creative Director Linda Koury Publisher, Storage Media Group Jillian Coffin jcoffin@techtarget.com Senior Vice President, International Bill Crowley bcrowley@techtarget.com TechTarget First Floor 3-4a Little Portland St. London, England W1W 7JB TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts. 22 Storage Essential Guide: Your options