Four Features that Are Influencing the Evolution of Midrange Arrays

It is coming up on a year since DCIG released its 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide and in that time, a number of new forces have emerged that are shaping up to impact how DCIG evaluates midrange arrays in its forthcoming 2013 Guide. Granted, traditional features such as its array management software, overall hardware capacity and VMware integration will remain key differentiators as DCIG evaluates midrange arrays. But support for third party data protection software, multi-hypervisor environments, solid state drives (SSDs) and unified storage (NAS & SAN) are influencing the evolution of midrange arrays today.
 
In just a few years DCIG Buyer's Guides have emerged as the go-to resource for users, vendors and value added resellers (VARs) when doing evaluations of midrange arrays. While there is a variety of reasons as to why that has occurred, the main reasons that everyone looks to this as an authoritative resource when doing midrange array comparisons are:

• No vendor pays DCIG to produce a particular Buyer's Guide. Vendor(s) with the top score or product are only given an option to license the Buyer's Guides after the research is complete.
• Any vendor's product can "win." Due to the hundred plus features that DCIG evaluates in each Buyer's Guide and applying different weightings to each feature, it is impossible for DCIG to predict at the outset which product will achieve the top score.
• It makes relatively complex technologies understandable. By assigning a total score and creating a standardized data sheet for each product, it makes it possible for anyone to understand how products stack up.

So as DCIG looks ahead to its upcoming DCIG 2013 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that we are examining what new demands end-users are placing on midrange arrays and in what ways midrange arrays are evolving to accommodate them. In the process of doing so DCIG has identified the following four features that are influencing the ongoing evolution of midrange arrays.

• Integration with third party software. As more companies virtualize their environments and use midrange arrays to host the data of these virtual machines (VMs), midrange array snapshot software is emerging as the first line of defense in protecting these VMs. This technique offloads the overhead associated with traditional backups from the host to the midrange array while shortening the backup and recovery window.

The trick to successfully implementing snapshots in one's environments and keeping them manageable is to use third party software to do so. So in this upcoming Midrange Array Buyer's Guide, we will examine more than if a midrange array supports snapshot software. We will take a deeper look at what third party data software is available to manage and protect them.

• Multi-hypervisor environments. VMware may be the current kingpin of the hypervisor world but Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are quietly (or maybe not so quietly) nipping at VMware's heels. As the functionality of these hypervisors improve even as the cost of their software remains at a discount compared to VMware, more enterprises are bringing these three hypervisors into their environment.

As this occurs, midrange arrays have to adapt to accommodate to support the concurrent attachment of these multiple hypervisors to their arrays. Exactly what this means and how having multiple hypervisors attach to a single midrange array will impact how they are managed and will perform is yet to be determined.

• Solid state drives (SSD). Replacing an HDD with an SSD in an HDD slot is supported by almost every midrange array. However how well each midrange array manages an SSD once it is in an HDD slot differs significantly. Midrange arrays now need to account for new factors such as erasure cycles and garbage collection when managing SSDs which midrange arrays are just getting their arms around.

• Unified storage. Organizations want more flexibility to buy a single midrange array that support both SAN (FC, FCoE, iSCSI) and NAS (CIFS, NFS) protocols coming into it. In fact, this is why DCIG is releasing a separate Unified Storage Buyer's Guide in the next few months. However DCIG is going to continue with its existing Midrange Array Buyer's Guide in its current format for one simple reason: Unified Storage arrays are not yet as adapt as handling the performance intensive workloads associated with block-based environments.

However unified storage is having an impact on block-based midrange arrays in that organizations at least want the option to connect to these arrays using NAS protocols.