Market Research

Should Storage Services Reside in Arrays or Application Stacks?

Research shows that in shops with more than 100 TB of shared data, DAS is consistently between 20-35% more expensive than SAN on a TCO basis. The reasons are twofold: 1) SAN is a shared resource and is more efficient than DAS when it can support multiple applications; 2) DAS requires more CPU resources, which increases software license costs, a clear motivating factor for ISVs to recommend DAS.

"Increasingly, the Microsoft and Oracle application stacks include storage-related services. Examples include Microsoft Data Availability Groups (DAG) for Exchange 2010 and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Leveraging the application stack to provide storage services can simplify storage infrastructure, speed recovery, and eliminate organizational friction between application groups and SAN infrastructure practitioners. But this approach brings tradeoffs that IT organizations need to assess. "Independent software vendors (ISVs) generally, and Microsoft and Oracle specifically will emphasize that vertically integrated storage services reduce overhead, simplify infrastructure, and reduce cost. CIO’s should ask two questions to determine if a vertically integrated storage strategy makes sense: To what degree can SAN infrastructure be shared across the application portfolio? What is the impact of a vertically integrated stack approach on software license and maintenance costs and overall end-user availability? "