Of Storage Systems, Software, Upgrades And TCO

As I've discussed previously in The Storage World Goes Xeon, the advance of mainline server technology has caught up with the storage market. Many, if not most, of the storage products introduced in the past year or 18 months are based on basically the same Xeon or Opteron processors and motherboards as the servers that connect to them. The question then becomes: When it's time for an upgrade, is the system the server or the software?

With all the buzz around Compellent's announcement of new server-based controllers and a new version of its software, one of the company's most customer-friendly business policies got short shrift. Owners of older Compellent systems can run the new software. If their systems are new enough to have PCIe slots, users can add the FCoE and SAS connections, too.

If you buy a Compellent system and license features, such as Live Volume, those licenses belong to the conceptual system on which you install them. Replace the old controllers with new Nehalem-based controllers and it's still the same system and the licenses go with it.

Compare this with the traditional custom hardware-based system. At some point, new versions of the array software won't run on the old system and you have to swap out at least the controllers, and possibly the drives and drive trays, creating an all-new system. If you want features from the old system, such as snapshots and thin provisioning, on the new one you have to license them all over again.  

If a Compellent system stays in your data center for 10 to 12 years, with hardware and software periodically replaced, you could save a bundle on feature licenses alone, compared with how they could add up over the two or three upgrades that a system from a more conventional vendor would need over that same stretch of time.Compare that with my experience with some major vendors and Windows Storage Server-based NAS appliances. When I got to the college I worked for, they had a WSS-based NAS from a major vendor running the Windows 2000 version of WSS. It was the year 2006 at the time, so I called the vendor and discovered that even though Microsoft made 32-bit versions of WSS 2003, the vendor was only offering Version 2003 on 64-bit systems and there was no upgrade for this 2-year-old NAS.

Today, major vendors will sell WSS 2008 to WSS 2008 R2 upgrades. However, if you bought your NAS in early 2009, it was still running WSS 2003 because WSS 2008 wasn't released to OEMs until May 2009, and the vendor won't sell an upgrade.

So, in addition to price and performance, take a good hard look at your prospective vendor's upgrade policies. They could have a major impact on how long you can run a system and its total cost of ownership.