HP eases itself into NAS waters

1999-10-14

Following its announcement in September, Hewlett Packard demonstrated its SureStore HD Server 400 range of NAS devices which are due for release on November 1.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices enable disk storage to be connected to a LAN, employing thin server technology to provide the basic minimum of an operating system required to serve files to LAN clients. The market for NAS has been widely predicted to grow rapidly over the next five years. Figures from DataQuest, for example, estimate the market to reach $10 billion by 2003. Even if it only attains half that, this is seen as an opportunity which storage vendors can ill afford to ignore. The current main player is Network Appliance, whose NAS devices sell for about $20,000 apiece. NetApp was ranked at #4 in Fortune’s fastest growing companies listing, testament to the potential of this technology. Put it this way – the company does not make anything else.

HP have signalled that it wants more than a slice of this pie. Its intention is “to dominate the NAS market”. Time to market has, however, limited the range of devices that the company will be selling, at least in the short term. Initial products will support between 27 and 108Gb of data and will only be accessible from Windows NT clients and servers. Costs lie between $5,000 and $10,000.

So – does the NAS market merit all this excitement? The answer is, probably, yes, but not for the reasons that are being touted. NAS devices are seen as a solution to the requirement of adding storage to a network, quickly and simply. Yes – they can do this. However the real advantage lies in the fact that storage processing and application processing no longer have to be run on the same box. Storage-specific devices, attached directly to the LAN, are inherently more manageable than multi-purpose servers as they do one thing and they are optimised to do it well. Anyone who has attempted to reconfigure a set of general purpose servers (for example, “we want to move the users onto this box, consolidate the databases onto this box and use this box as our messaging server”) knows the loops that have to be jumped through to achieve their aims. Specialised devices do not solve this problem, but they do limit it happening in the first place.

There is one issue that is not being addressed by any of the NAS vendors at present. Just as NAS is seen in terms of storage rather than in the context of an overall IT architecture, so we still lack the tools to enable us to manage the distribution, accessibility and availability of our information assets. It is an unfortunate reality that storage requirements will always outstrip our capability to increase capacity, so the longer term solution must lie with better management of information as well as increasing the basic resource. NAS can only ever be part of the answer.

(First published 14 October 1999)