Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays

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Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose,

High-End Storage Arrays
20 November 2014 ID:G00263130
Analyst(s): Valdis Filks, Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox

VIEW SUMMARY

Overview
Key Findings
With the inclusion of solid-state drives in arrays, performance is no longer a differentiator in its
own right, but a scalability enabler that improves operational and financial efficiency by facilitating
storage consolidation.

NOTE 1
Z/OS SUPPORT
This research compares storage arrays that support
z/OS mainframe environments with arrays that do not.
This difference in the presence or absence of z/OS
support is taken into account only in the array
ecosystem ratings, where it contributes positively to
arrays supporting z/OS, and has no influence on arrays
not supporting z/OS. It has no influence on other
ratings or the rating weights used in the tool.

Product differentiation is created primarily by differences in architecture, software functionality,

data flow, support and microcode quality, rather than components and packaging.
Clustered, scale-out, and federated storage architectures and products can achieve levels of scale,
performance, reliability, serviceability and availability comparable to traditional, scale-up high-end
arrays.
The feature sets of high-end storage arrays adapt slowly, and the older systems are incapable of
offering data reduction, virtualization and unified protocol support.

Recommendations
Move beyond technical attributes to include vendor service and support capabilities, as well as
acquisition and ownership costs, when making your high-end storage array buying decisions.
Don't always use the ingrained, dominant considerations of incumbency, vendor and product
reputations when choosing high-end storage solutions.
Vary the ratios of SSDs, Serial Attached SCSI and SATA hard-disk drives in the storage array, and
limit maximum configurations based on system performance to ensure that SLAs are met during
the planned service life of the system.
Select disk arrays based on the weighting and criteria created by your IT department to meet your
organizational or business objectives, rather than choosing those with the most features or
highest overall scores.

What You Need to Know

Superior nondisruptive serviceability and data protection characterize high-end arrays. They are the
visible metrics that differentiate high-end array models from other arrays, although the gap is closing.
The software architectures used in many high-end storage arrays can trace their lineage back 20 years
or more.
Although this maturity delivers high availability and broad ecosystem support, it is also becoming a
hindrance with respect to flexibility, adaptability and delays to the introduction of new features,
compared with newer designs. Administrative and management interfaces are often more complicated
when using arrays involving older software designs, no matter how much the internal structures are
hidden or abstracted. The ability of older systems to provide unified storage protocols, data reduction
and detailed performance instrumentation is also limited, because the original software was not
designed with these capabilities as design objectives.

CRITICAL CAPABILITIES METHODOLOGY

This methodology requires analysts to identify the
critical capabilities for a class of products or services.
Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative
importance for specific product or service use cases.
Next, products/services are rated in terms of how well
they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A score
that summarizes how well they meet the critical
capabilities for each use case is then calculated for
each product/service.
"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate
products/services in a class in terms of their quality
and performance. Gartner recommends that users
consider the set of critical capabilities as some of the
most important criteria for acquisition decisions.
In defining the product/service category for evaluation,
the analyst first identifies the leading uses for the
products/services in this market. What needs are endusers looking to fulfill, when considering
products/services in this market? Use cases should
match common client deployment scenarios. These
distinct client scenarios define the Use Cases.
The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities.
These capabilities are generalized groups of features
commonly required by this class of products/services.
Each capability is assigned a level of importance in
fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features are
more important than others, depending on the use
case being evaluated.
Each vendors product or service is evaluated in terms
of how well it delivers each capability, on a five-point
scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all
vendors, allowing easy comparisons between the
different sets of features.
Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:
1 = Poor: most or all defined requirements not
achieved
2 = Fair: some requirements not achieved

Gartner expects that, within the next four years, arrays using legacy software will need major reengineering to remain competitive against newer systems that achieve high-end status, as well as
hybrid storage solutions that use solid-state technologies to improve performance, storage efficiency
and availability. In this research, the aggregated scores among the arrays are minimal. Therefore,
clients are advised to look at the individual capabilities that are important to them, rather than the
overall score.
Because array differentiation has decreased, the real challenge of performing a successful storage
infrastructure upgrade is not designing an infrastructure upgrade that works, but designing one that
optimizes agility and minimizes total cost of ownership (TCO). Another practical consideration is that
choosing a suboptimal solution is likely to have only a moderate impact on deployment and TCO for the
following reasons:
Product advantages are usually short-lived and temporary. Gartner refers to this phenomenon as
the "compression of product differentiation."

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements
5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements
To determine an overall score for each product in the
use cases, the product ratings are multiplied by the
weightings to come up with the product score in use
cases.
The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not
represent all capabilities for any product; therefore,
may not represent those most important for a specific
use situation or business objective. Clients should use
a critical capabilities analysis as one of several sources
of input about a product before making a
product/service decision.

Most clients report that differences in management and monitoring tools, as well as ecosystem
support among various vendors' offerings, are not enough to change staffing requirements.
Storage TCO, although growing, still accounts for less than 10% (6.5% in 2013) of most IT
budgets.

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Analysis
Introduction
The arrays evaluated in this research include scale-up, scale-out, hybrid and unified storage
architectures. Because these arrays have different availability characteristics, performance profiles,
scalability, ecosystem support, pricing and warranties, they enable users to tailor solutions against
operational needs, planned new application deployments, and forecast growth rates and asset
management strategies.
Midrange arrays with scale-out characteristics can satisfy the high-availability criteria when configured
with four or more controllers and multiple disk shelves. Whether these differences in availability are
enough to affect infrastructure design and operational procedures will vary by user environment, and
will also be influenced by other considerations, such as host system/capacity scaling, downtime costs,
lost opportunity costs and the maturity of the end-user change control procedures (e.g., hardware,
software, procedures and scripting), which directly affect availability.

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

The weighted capabilities scores for all use cases are displayed as components of the overall score (see
Figures 1 through 6).

Figure 1. Vendors' Product Scores for the Overall Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 2. Vendors' Product Scores for the Consolidation Use Case

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Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 3. Vendors' Product Scores for the OLTP Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 4. Vendors' Product Scores for the Server Virtualization and VDI Use Case

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Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 5. Vendors' Product Scores for the Analytics Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Figure 6. Vendors' Product Scores for the Cloud Use Case

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Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Vendors
DataDirect Networks SFA12K
The SFA12KX, the newest member of the SFA12K family, increases SFA12K performance/throughput
via a hardware refresh and through software improvements. Like other members of the SFA12K family,
it remains a dual-controller array that, with the exception of an in-storage processing capability,
prioritizes scalability, performance/throughput and availability over value-added functionality, such as
local and remote replication, thin provisioning and autotiering. These priorities align better with the
needs of the high-end, high-performance computing (HPC) market than with general-purpose IT
environments. Further enhancing the appeal of the SFA12KX in large environments is dense packaging:
84 HDDs/4U or 5 PB/rack, and GridScaler and ExaScaler gateways that support parallel file systems,
based on IBM's GPFS or the open-source Lustre parallel file system.
The combination of high bandwidth and high areal densities has made the SFA12K a popular array in
the HPC, cloud, surveillance and media markets that prioritize automatic block alignment and
bandwidth over input/output operations per second (IOPS). The SFA12K's high areal density also makes
it an attractive repository for big data and inactive data, particularly as a backup target for backup
solutions doing their own compression and/or deduplication. Offsetting these strengths are limited
ecosystem support beyond parallel file systems and backup/restore products; lack of vSphere API for
Array Integration (VAAI) support, which limits its appeal for use as VMware storage; zero bit detection,
which limits its appeal with applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Database; and quality of
service (QoS) and security features that could limit its appeal in multitenancy environments.

EMC VMAX
The maturity of the VMAX 10K, 20K and 40K hardware, combined with the Enginuity software and wide
ecosystem support, provides proven reliability and stability. However, the need for backward
compatibility has complicated the development of new functions, such as data reduction. The VMAX3,
which has recently become generally available, has not yet had time to be market-validated, because it
only became available on 26 September 2014. Even with new controllers, promised Hypermax software
updates and a new InfiniBand internal interconnect, mainframe support is not available, nor is the littleused Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. Nevertheless, with new functions, such as in-built
VPLEX, recover point replication, virtual thin provisioning and more processing power, customers should
move quickly to the VMAX3, because it has the potential to develop further.
The new VMAX 100K, 200K and 400K arrays still lack independent benchmark results, which, in some
cases, leads users to delay deploying a new feature into production environments until the feature's
performance has been fully profiled, and its impact on native performance is fully understood. The lack
of independent benchmark results has also led to misunderstandings regarding the configuration of
back-end SSDs and HDDs into redundant array of independent disks (RAID) groups, which have
required users to add capacity to enable the use of more-expensive 3D+1P RAID groups to achieve
needed performance levels, rather than larger, more-economical 7D+1P RAID groups.
EMC's expansion into software-defined storage (SDS; aka ViPR), network-based replication (aka
RecoverPoint) and network-based virtualization (aka VPLEX) suggests that new VMAX users should
evaluate the use of these products, in addition to VMAX-based features, when creating their storage
infrastructure and operational visions.

Fujitsu Eternus DX8700 S2

The DX8700 S2 series is a mature, high-end array with a reputation for robust engineering and
reliability, with redundant RAID groups spanning enclosures and redundant controller failover features.
Within the high-end segment, Fujitsu offers simple unlimited software licensing on a per-controller

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basis; therefore, customers do not need to spend more as they increase the capacity of the arrays. The
DX8700 S2 series was updated with a new level of software to improve performance and improved
QoS, which not only manages latency and bandwidth, but also integrates with the DX8700 Automated
Storage Tiering to move data to the required storage tier to meet QoS targets. It is a scale-out array,
providing up to eight controllers.
The DX8700 S2 has offered massive array of idle disks (MAID) or disk spin-down for years. Even
though this feature has been implemented successfully without any reported problems, it has not been
adopted, nor has it gained popular market acceptance. The same Eternus SF management software is
used across the entire DX product line, from the entry level to the high end. This simplifies
manageability, migration and replication among Fujitsu storage arrays. Customer feedback is positive
concerning the performance, reliability, support and serviceability of the DX8700 S2, and Gartner
clients report that the DX8700 S2 RAID rebuild times are faster than comparable systems. The
management interface is geared toward storage experts, but is simplified in the Eternus SF V16,
thereby reducing training costs and improving storage administrator productivity. To enable workflow
integration with SDS platforms, Fujitsu is working closely with the OpenStack project.

HDS HUS VM
The Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) VM is an entry-level version of the
Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) series. Similar to its larger VSP siblings, it is built around Hitachi's crossbar switches, has the same functionality as the VSP, can replicate to HUS VM or VSP systems using
TrueCopy or Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR), and uses the same management tools as the VSP.
Because it shares APIs with the VSP, it has the same ecosystem support; however, it does not scale to
the same storage capacity levels as the HDS VSP G1000. Similarly, it does not provide data reduction
features. Hardware reliability and microcode quality are good; this increases the appeal of its Universal
Volume Manager (UVM), which enables the HUS VM to virtualize third-party storage systems.
Hitachi Data Systems offers performance transparency with its arrays, with SPC-1 performance and
throughput benchmark results available. Client feedback indicates that the use of thin provisioning
generally improves performance and that autotiering has little to no impact on array performance.
Snapshots have a measurably negative, but entirely acceptable, impact on performance and
throughput. Offsetting these strengths are the lack of native Internet Small Computer System Interface
(iSCSI) and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support, which is particularly useful for remote replication, as
well as relatively slow integration with server virtualization, database, shareware and backup offerings.
Integration with the Hitachi NAS platform adds iSCSI, Common Internet File System (CIFS) and
Network File System (NFS) protocol support for users that need more than just Fibre Channel support.

HDS VSP G1000

The VSP has built its market appeal on reliability, quality microcode and solid performance, as well as
its ability to virtualize third-party storage systems using UVM. The latest VSP G1000 was launched in
April 2014, with more capacity and performance/throughput achieved via faster controllers and
improved data flows. Configuration flexibility has been improved by a repackaging of hardware that
enables controllers to be packaged in a separate rack. VSP packaging also supports the addition of
capacity-only nodes that can be separated from the controllers. It provides a larger variety of features,
such as a unified storage, heterogeneous storage virtualization and content management via
integration with HCAP. Data compression and reduction are not supported. Performance needs dictate
and independently configure each redundant node's front- and back-end ports, cache, and back-end
capacity. However, accelerated flash can be used to accelerate performance in hybrid configurations.
Additional feature highlights include thin provisioning, autotiering, volume-cloning and space-efficient
snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, and three-site replication topologies.
The VSP asynchronous replication (aka HUR) is built around the concept of journal files stored on disk,
which makes HUR tolerant of communication line failures, allows users to trade off bandwidth
availability against recovery point objectives (RPOs) and reduces the demands placed on cache. It also
offers a data flow that enables the remote VSP to pull writes to protected volumes on the disaster
recovery site, rather than having the production-side VSP push these writes to the disaster recovery
site. Pulling writes, rather than pushing them, reduces the impact of HUR on the VSP systems and
reduces bandwidth requirements, which lowers costs. Offsetting these strengths are the lack of native
iSCSI and 10GbE support, as well as relatively slow integration with server virtualization, database,
shareware and backup offerings.

HP 3PAR StoreServ 10000

The 3PAR StoreServ 10000 is HP's preferred, go-to, high-end storage system for open-system
infrastructures that require the highest levels of performance and resiliency. Scalable from two to eight
controller-nodes, the 3PAR StoreServ 10000 requires a minimum of four controller-nodes to satisfy
Gartner's high-end, general-purpose storage system definition. Competitive with small and midsize,
traditional, frame-based, high-end storage arrays, particularly with regard to storage efficiency features
and ease of use, HP continues to make material R&D investments to enhance 3PAR StoreServ 10000
availability, performance, capacity scalability and security capabilities. Configuring 3PAR StoreServ
storage arrays with four or more nodes limits the effects of high-impact electronics failures to no more
than 25% of the system's performance and throughput. The impact of electronic failures is further
reduced by 3PAR's Persistent Cache and Persistent Port failover features, which enable the caches in
surviving nodes to stay in write-in mode and active host connections to remain online.
Resiliency features include three-site replication topologies, as well as Peer Persistence, which enables
transparent failover and failback between two 3PAR StoreServ 10000 systems located within
metropolitan distances. However, offsetting the benefit of these functions are the relatively long RPOs
that result from 3PAR's asynchronous remote copy actually sending the difference between two snaps
to faraway disaster recovery sites; microcode updates that can be time-consuming, because the time
required is proportional to the number of nodes in the system; and a relatively large footprint caused
by the use of four-disk magazines, instead of more-dense packaging schemes.

HP XP7

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Sourced from Hitachi Ltd. under joint technology and OEM agreements, the HP XP7 is the next
incremental evolution of the high-end, frame-based XP-Series that HP has been selling since 1999.
Engineered to be deployed in support of applications that require the highest levels of resiliency and
performance, the HP XP7 features increased capacity scalability and performance over its predecessor,
the HP XP P9500, while leveraging the broad array of proven HP-XP-series data management software.
Beyond expected capacity and performance improvements, the new Active-Active High Availability and
Active-Active data mobility functions that elevate storage system and data center availability to higher
levels, as well as providing nondisruptive, transparent application mobility among hosts servers at the
same or different sites are two notable enhancements. The HP XP7 shares a common technology base
with the Hitachi/HDS VSP G1000, and HP differentiates the XP7 in the areas of broader integration and
testing with the full HP portfolio ecosystem and the availability of Metro Cluster for HP Unix, as well as
by restricting the ability to replicate between XP7 and HDS VSPs.
Positioned in HP's traditional storage portfolio, the primary mission of the XP7 is to serve as an upgrade
platform to the XP-Series installed base, as well as to address opportunities involving IBM mainframe
and storage for HP Nonstop infrastructures. Since HP acquired 3PAR, XP-Series revenue continues to
decline annually, as HP places more go-to-market weight behind the 3PAR StoreServ 10000 offering.

Huawei OceanStor 18000

The OceanStor 18000 storage array supports both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. Data flows are
built around Huawei's Smart Matrix switch, which interconnects as many as 16 controllers, each
configured with its own host connections and cache, with back-end storage directly connected to each
engine. Hardware build quality is good, and shows attention to detail in packaging and cabling. The
feature set includes storage-efficiency features, such as thin provisioning and autotiering, snapshots,
synchronous and asynchronous replication, QoS that nondisruptively rebalances workloads to optimize
resource utilization, and the ability to virtualize a limited number of external storage arrays.
Software is grouped into four bundles and is priced on capacity, except for path failover and loadbalancing software, which is priced by the number of attached hosts to encourage widespread usage.
The compatibility support matrix includes Windows, various Unix and Linux implementations, VMware
(including VAAI and vCenter Site Recovery Manager support) and Hyper-V. Offsetting these strengths
are relatively limited integration with various backup/restore products, configuration and management
tools that are more technology- than ease-of-use-oriented, a lack of documentation and storage
administrators familiar with Huawei, and a support organization that is largely untested outside
mainland China.

IBM DS8870
The DS8870 is a scale-up, two-node controller architecture that is based and dependent on IBM's Power
server business. Because IBM owns the z/OS architecture, IBM has inherent cross-selling, product
integration and time-to-market advantages supporting new z/OS features, relative to its competitors.
Snapshot and replication capabilities are robust, extensive and relatively efficient, as shown by features
such as FlashCopy; synchronous, asynchronous three-site replication; and consistency groups that can
span arrays. The latest significant DS8870 updates include Easy Tier improvements, as well as a High
Performance Flash Enclosure, which eliminates earlier, SSD-related architectural inefficiencies and
boosts array performance. Even with the addition of the Flash Enclosure, the DS8870 is no longer IBM's
high-performance system, and data reduction features are not available unless extra SAN Volume
Controller (SVC) devices are purchased in addition to the DS8870.
Overall, the DS8870 is a competitive offering. Ease-of-use improvements have been achieved by taking
the XIV management GUI and implementing it on the DS8870. However, customer reports are that the
new GUI still needs a more detailed administrative approach, and is not yet suited to high-level
management, as provided by the XIV icon-based GUI. Due to the dual-controller design, major software
updates can disable one of the controllers for as long as an hour. These updates need to be planned,
because they can reduce the availability and performance of the system by as much as 50% during the
upgrade process. With muted traction in VMware and Microsoft infrastructures, IBM positions the
DS8870 as its primary enterprise storage platform to support z/OS and AIX infrastructures.

IBM XIV
The current XIV is in its third generation. The freedom from legacy dependencies is apparent from its
modern, easy-to-use, icon-based operational interface, and a scale-out distributed processing and RAID
protection scheme. Good performance and the XIV management interface are winning deals for IBM.
This generation enhances performance with the introduction of SSD and a faster InfiniBand interconnect
among the XIV nodes. The advantages of the XIV are simple administration and inclusive software
licenses, which make buying and upgrading the XIV simple, without hidden or additional storage
software license charges. The mirror RAID implementation creates a raw versus usable capacity, which
is not as efficient as traditional RAID 5/6 designs; therefore, the scalability only reaches 325TB.
However, together with inclusive software licensing, the XIV usable capacity is priced accordingly, so
that the price per TB is competitive in the market.
A new Hyper-Scale feature enables IBM to federate a number of XIV platforms to create a PB+ scale
infrastructure under the Hyper-Scale Manager to enable the administration of several XIV systems as
one. Positioned as IBM's primary high-end storage platform for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and cloud
infrastructure deployments, IBM has released several new and incremental XIV enhancements,
foremost of which are three-site mirroring, multitenancy and VMware vCloud Suite integration.

NetApp FAS8000
The high-end FAS series model numbers were changed from FAS6000 to FAS8000. The upgrade
included faster controllers and storage virtualization built into the system and enabled via a software
license. Because each FAS8000 HA node pair is a scale-up, dual-controller array, to qualify for inclusion
in this Critical Capabilities research requires that the NetApp FAS8000 series must be configured with at
least four FAS8000 nodes managed by Clustered Data Ontap. This supports a maximum of eight nodes
for deployment with storage area network (SAN) protocols and up to 24 nodes with NAS protocols.

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Depending on drive capacity, Clustered Data Ontap can support a maximum raw capacity of 2.6PB to
23.0PB in a SAN infrastructure, and 7.8PB to 69.1PB in a NAS infrastructure.
The FAS system is no longer the flagship high-performance, low-latency storage array for NetApp
customers that value performance over all other criteria. They can now choose NetApp products such as
the FlashRay. Seamless scalability, nondisruptive upgrades, robust data service software, storageefficiency capabilities, flash-enhanced performance, unified block-and-file multiprotocol support,
multitenant support, ease of use and validated integration with leading independent software vendors
(ISVs) are key attributes of an FAS8000 configured with Clustered Data Ontap.

Oracle FS1-2
The hybrid FS1-2 series replaces the Oracle Pillar Axiom storage arrays and is the newest array family
in this research. Even though the new system has fewer SSD and HDD slots, scalability in terms of
capacity is increased by approximately 30% to a total of 2.9PB, which includes up to 912TB of SSD. The
design remains a scale-out architecture with the ability to cluster eight FS1-2 pairs together. The FS1
has an inclusive software licensing model, which makes upgrades simpler from a licensing perspective.
The software features included within this model are QoS Plus, automated tiered storage, thin
provisioning, support for up to 64 physical domains (multitenancy) and multiple block-and-file protocol
support. However, if replication is required, Oracle MaxRep engine is a chargeable optional extra.
The MaxRep product provides synchronous and asynchronous replication, consistency groups and
multihop replication topologies. It can be used to replicate and, therefore, migrate older Axiom arrays
to newer FS1-2 arrays. Positioned to provide best-of-breed performance in an Oracle infrastructure, the
FS1-2 enables Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) to optimize Oracle Database performance, as well
as engineered integration with Oracle's virtual machine (VM) and its broad library of data management
software. However, the FS1 has yet to fully embrace integration with competing hypervisors from
VMware and Microsoft.

Context
Even as much of the storage array market is consolidating into one general-purpose market, Gartner
appreciates the entrenched usage and appeal of simple labels. Therefore, even though the terms
"midrange" and "high end" no longer accurately describe present array capabilities, user buying
behaviors or future market directions, Gartner has chosen to publish separate midrange and high-end
Critical Capabilities research (see Note 1). By doing so, Gartner can provide analyses of more arrays in
a potentially more traditional, client-friendly format.

Product/Service Class Definition

Architectural Definitions
The following criteria classify storage array architectures by their externally visible characteristics,
rather than vendor claims or other nonproduct criteria that may be influenced by fads in the disk array
storage market.
Scale-Up Architectures
Front-end connectivity, internal bandwidth and back-end capacity scale independently of each
other.
Logical volumes, files or objects are fragmented and spread across user-defined collections of
disks, such as disk pools, disk groups or RAID sets.
Capacity, performance and throughput are limited by physical packaging constraints, such as the
number of slots in a backplane and/or interconnect constraints.
Scale-Out Architectures
Capacity, performance, throughput and connectivity scale with the number of nodes in the
system.
Logical volumes, files or objects are fragmented and spread across multiple storage nodes to
protect against hardware failures and improve performance.
Scalability is limited by software and networking architectural constraints, not physical packaging
or interconnect limitations.
Hybrid Architectures
Incorporate SSD, HDD, compression and/or deduplication into basic design
Can be implemented as scale-up or scale-out arrays
Can support one or more protocols, such as block or file, and/or object protocols, including FC,
iSCSI, NFS, Server Message Block (SMB; aka CIFS), FCoE and InfiniBand
Including compression and deduplication in the initial system design often results in both having a
neutral to often positive impact on system performance and throughput, as well as simplified
management, in part by eliminating byte boundary alignment considerations in array configurations.
Unified Architectures
Can simultaneously support one or more block, file, and/or object protocols, including FC, iSCSI,
NFS, SMB (aka CIFS), FCoE, InfiniBand and others
Include gateway and integrated data flow implementations
Can be implemented as scale-up or scale-out arrays
Gateway implementations provision block storage to gateways that implement NAS and object storage
protocols. Gateway-style implementations run separate NAS and SAN microcode loads on either
virtualized or physical servers, and, consequently, have different thin provisioning, autotiering,

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snapshot and remote copy features that are not interoperable. By contrast, integrated or unified
storage implementations use the same primitives independent of protocol, which enable them to create
snapshots that span SAN and NAS storage, and dynamically allocate server cycles, bandwidth and
cache, based on QoS algorithms and/or policies.
Mapping the strengths and weaknesses of these different storage architectures to various use cases
should begin with an overview of each architecture's strengths and weakness, as well as an
understanding of workload requirements (see Table 1).

Table 1. Strengths and Weaknesses of the Storage Architectures

Strengths
Scale
Up

Mature architectures:
Reliable
Cost-competitive
Large ecosystems
Independently upgrade:
Host connections

Weaknesses
Performance and bandwidth do not scale with capacity
Limited compute power may result in the use of efficiency
and data protection features negatively affecting
performance
Electronics failures and microcode updates may be highimpact events

Back-end capacity
May offer shorter RPOs over
asynchronous distances

Scale
Out

IOPS and GB/sec scale with

capacity

High electronics costs relative to back-end storage costs

Nondisruptive load balancing

Greater fault tolerance than scaleup architectures
Use of commodity components

Hybrid

Efficient use of Flash,

compression and deduplication

Relatively immature technology

Limited ecosystem and protocol support

Consistent performance
experience with minimal tuning
Excellent price/performance
Low environmental footprint

Unified

Maximal deployment flexibility

Performance may vary by protocol (block versus file)

Comprehensive storage efficiency

features

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Critical Capabilities Definition

Manageability
This refers to the automation, management, monitoring, and reporting tools and programs supported
by the platform. This can include single-pane management consoles, and monitoring and reporting tools
designed to support personnel seamlessly, manage systems, and monitor system usage and
efficiencies.
They can also be used to anticipate and correct system alarms and fault conditions before or soon after
they occur.

RAS
Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) is a design philosophy that consistently delivers high
availability by building systems with reliable components, "derates" components to increase their mean
times between failures, and designs systems and clocking to tolerate marginal components.
RAS also involves hardware and microcode designs that minimize the number of critical failure modes in
the system; serviceability features that enable nondisruptive microcode updates; diagnostics that
minimize human errors when troubleshooting the system; and nondisruptive repair activities. Uservisible features can include tolerance of multiple disk and/or node failures, fault isolation techniques,
built-in protection against data corruption, and other techniques (such as snapshots and replication) to
meet customers' RPOs and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Performance
This collective term describes IOPS, bandwidth (MB/second) and response times (milliseconds per I/O)
visible to attached servers. In well-designed systems, the potential performance bottlenecks are
encountered at the same time when supporting various common workload profiles.
When comparing systems, users are reminded that performance is more a scalability enabler than a
differentiator in its own right.

Snapshot and Replication

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Page 10 of 12

These features protect against and recover from data corruption problems caused by human and
software errors, and technology and site failures, respectively. They are also useful in reducing backup
windows and minimizing the impact of backups on production workloads.
Archiving also benefits from these features in the same way as backups.

Scalability
This refers to the ability of the storage system to grow not just capacity, but performance and host
connectivity. The concept of usable scalability links capacity growth and system performance to SLAs
and application needs.

Ecosystem
This refers to the ability of the platform to support third-party ISV applications, such as databases,
backup/archiving products and management tools, hypervisor and desktop virtualization offerings, and
various OSs.

Multitenancy and Security

This refers to the ability of a storage system to support a diverse variety of workloads, isolate
workloads from each other, and provide user access controls and auditing capabilities that log changes
to the system configuration.

Storage Efficiency
This refers to the ability of the platform to support storage-efficiency technologies, such as
compression, deduplication, thin provisioning and autotiering, to improve utilization rates, while
reducing storage acquisition and ownership costs.

Use Cases
Overall
Overall use case is a generalized usage scenario. It does not represent the ways specific users will
utilize or deploy technologies or services in their enterprises.

Consolidation
This simplifies storage management and disaster recovery, and improves economies of scale by
consolidating multiple, dissimilar storage systems into fewer, larger systems.
RAS, performance, scalability, and multitenancy and security are heavily weighted selection criteria,
because the system becomes a shared resource, which magnifies the effects of outages and
performance bottlenecks.

OLTP
Online transaction processing (OLTP) is affiliated with business-critical applications, such as database
management systems.
These require 24/7 availability and subsecond transaction response times. Hence, the greatest
emphasis on RAS and performance features, followed by snapshots and replication, which enable rapid
recovery from data corruption problems and technology or site failure. Manageability, scalability and
storage efficiency are important, because they enable the storage system to scale with data growth,
while staying within budget constraints.

Server Virtualization and VDI

This use case encompasses business-critical applications, back-office and batch workloads, and
development.
The need to deliver I/O response times of 5 ms or lower to large numbers of VMs or desktops that
generate cache-unfriendly workloads, while providing 24/7 availability, heavily weights performance
and storage efficiency, followed closely by multitenancy and security. The heavy reliance on SSDs,
autotiering, QoS features that prioritize and throttle I/Os, and DR solutions that are tightly integrated
with virtualization software also makes RAS and manageability important criteria.

Analytics
This applies to storage consumed by big data applications using map/reduce technologies.
It also involves all analytic applications that are packaged, or provide business intelligence (BI)
capabilities for a particular domain or business problem (see definition in "Hype Cycle for Analytic
Applications, 2013").

Cloud
This applies to storage arrays used in private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures, and how they
apply to specific, cost, scale, manageability and performance needs.
Hence, storage efficiency and resiliency are important selection considerations, and are highly
weighted.

Inclusion Criteria
This research evaluates the high-end, general-purpose storage systems supporting the use cases
enumerated in Table 2.

Table 2. Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases

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Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays

Critical Capabilities

Overall

Consolidation

OLTP

Server Virtualization
and VDI

Analytics

Cloud

Manageability

13%

12%

10%

13%

15%

16%

RAS

17%

18%

20%

14%

15%

15%

Performance

16%

5%

25%

20%

20%

10%

Snapshot and
Replication

10%

5%

10%

12%

15%

10%

Scalability

13%

15%

15%

9%

10%

15%

Ecosystem

8%

8%

5%

10%

7%

9%

11%

18%

5%

10%

8%

15%

Multitenancy and
Security
Storage Efficiency
Total

Page 11 of 12

12%

19%

10%

12%

10%

10%

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

As of November 2014

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products/services.
Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance for specific product/service use
cases.
The 12 storage arrays selected for inclusion in this research are offered by vendors discussed in "Magic
Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays," which includes arrays supporting block and/or file
protocols. Following are the "go/no-go" criteria that must be met for classification as a high-end storage
array. These criteria for qualification as a high-end array are more severe than those for midrange
arrays. For this reason, arrays that satisfy the high-end criteria also satisfy the midrange criteria. More
specifically, high-end arrays must meet the following criteria:
Single electronics failures:
Are invisible to the SAN and connected application servers
Affect less than 25% of the array's performance/throughput
Microcode updates:
Are nondisruptive and can be nondisruptively backed out
Affect less than 25% of the array's performance/throughput
Repair activities and capacity upgrades:
Are invisible to the SAN and connected application servers
Affect less than 50% of the array's performance/throughput
Support dynamic load balancing
Support local replication and remote replication
Typical high-end disk array ASPs more than $250,000
The storage arrays evaluated in this research include scale-up, scale-out and unified storage
architectures. Because these arrays have different availability characteristics, performance profiles,
scalability, ecosystem support, pricing and warranties, they enable users to tailor solutions against
operational needs, planned new application deployments, and forecast growth rates and asset
management strategies.

Critical Capabilities Rating

Each product or service that meets our inclusion criteria has been evaluated on several critical
capabilities on a scale from 1.0 (lowest ranking) to 5.0 (highest ranking). Rankings (see Table 3) are
not adjusted to account for differences in various target market segments. For example, a system
targeting the small and midsize business (SMB) market is less costly and less scalable than a system
targeting the enterprise market, and would rank lower on scalability than the larger array, despite the
SMB prospect not needing the extra scalability.

Table 3. Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Product or
Service
Ratings

DataDirect
Networks
SFA12K

EMC
VMAX

Fujitsu
Eternus
DX8700
S2

HDS
HUS
VM

HDS
VSP
G1000

HP 3PAR
StoreServ
10000

HP
XP7

Huawei
OceanStor
18000

IBM
DS8870

Manageability

4.0

4.2

3.8

4.0

4.0

4.5

4.0

3.5

4.0

RAS

3.7

4.3

4.2

4.3

4.5

3.7

4.5

4.2

4.2

Performance

4.5

3.8

4.2

3.7

4.3

4.0

4.3

4.0

4.0

Snapshot and
Replication

1.0

4.0

4.0

4.2

4.2

4.0

4.2

4.0

4.0

Scalability

4.5

4.3

4.5

3.3

4.5

4.0

4.5

4.0

3.8

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Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays

Product or
Service
Ratings

DataDirect
Networks
SFA12K

EMC
VMAX

Fujitsu
Eternus
DX8700
S2

HDS
HUS
VM

HDS
VSP
G1000

HP 3PAR
StoreServ
10000

HP
XP7

Huawei
OceanStor
18000

IBM
DS8870

Ecosystem

2.0

4.5

3.2

4.0

4.0

4.0

4.0

3.3

3.5

Multitenancy
and Security

3.3

3.7

4.0

4.0

4.2

4.0

4.2

4.0

4.0

Storage
Efficiency

3.2

3.5

3.5

3.5

3.5

4.2

3.5

3.3

3.7

Page 12 of 12

As of November 2014

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Table 4 shows the product/service scores for each use case. The scores, which are generated by
multiplying the use case weightings by the product/service ratings, summarize how well the critical
capabilities are met for each use case.

Table 4. Product Score on Use Cases

Use Cases

DataDirect
Networks
SFA12K

EMC
VMAX

Fujitsu
Eternus
DX8700
S2

HDS
HUS
VM

HDS
VSP
G1000

HP 3PAR
StoreServ
10000

HP
XP7

Huawei
OceanStor
18000

IBM
DS8870

Overall

3.46

4.03

3.98

3.87

4.18

4.04

4.18

3.83

3.93

Consolidation

3.46

4.00

3.94

3.85

4.13

4.04

4.13

3.79

3.91

OLTP

3.63

4.04

4.06

3.85

4.23

4.01

4.23

3.89

3.96

Server
Virtualization
and VDI

3.38

4.02

3.95

3.88

4.16

4.05

4.16

3.81

3.92

Analytics

3.38

4.03

3.98

3.90

4.18

4.05

4.18

3.84

3.95

Cloud

3.42

4.05

3.97

3.88

4.18

4.06

4.18

3.82

3.93

As of November 2014

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

To determine an overall score for each product/service in the use cases, multiply the ratings in Table 3
by the weightings shown in Table 2.

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