Big-time Storage on the Cheap

Computerworld - Late last year, Ameritrade Holding Corp.'s IT department began ripping out its high-end monolithic storage systems and replacing them with less-expensive and more-modular midrange storage arrays.

Asiff Hirji, CIO at the Omaha-based online brokerage, prides himself on having the most cost-efficient platform possible and says, "The performance in the midtier storage systems has come to the point where, for our needs, they do what we need them to do. We don't need to spend the additional money on the high-end systems. That's made a big difference on our cost per gigabyte."

The saturation of the enterprise marketplace with Fibre Channel storage-area network technology has forced vendors to look to midsize companies to fill their SAN orders. But in order to sell to that market, vendors have been forced to offer the same functionality that had been exclusive to high-end systems, industry experts say.

High-end or monolithic arrays are housed in refrigerator-size cabinets and come with all the processing capacity they'll ever have as well as a full set of feature functionality. High-end boxes can cost more than $1 million. In comparison, midrange or modular storage arrays range from $50,000 to about $300,000. Midrange arrays are housed in a rack and can start out as a low-end product and grow through the addition of controllers (processors) and functionality as business needs grow.

For example, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced in March that for the first time its SAN-to-SAN fail-over capability can be added to its midrange Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) products. Other high-end functionality, such as data snapshots, data mirroring and data migration, is now commonly found in midrange arrays from most major vendors.

Asiff Hirji, CIO of Ameritrade Holding Corp.

The trend downward is also revealed in vendor sales. EMC Corp. reported in its first-quarter earnings this year that its midrange Clariion line of storage arrays and related software saw more than a 40% revenue growth for the fourth quarter in a row. Meanwhile, its high-end Symmetrix array line went from 5% revenue growth four quarters ago to a 3% drop in revenue in the first quarter of this year.

Mike Sink, director of network and operational infrastructure at the Kichler Lighting Group in Cleveland, a wholesale lighting and fixture company that has customers in 140 countries, replaced a high-end EMC Symmetrix array a year ago with a midrange EMC Clariion CX600 array with 12TB capacity in order to back up 30 Unix and 30 Windows servers.