One of the first thoughts that almost always comes to mind when users think of Symantec’s Storage Foundation software is that it is hardware agnostic. That neutrality is not going away but new customer demands for turnkey solutions from a single provider are changing how all vendors have to operate. Symantec is not immune to these new trends and last week we saw a new era beginning with Symantec announcing its new FileStore N8300 appliance that is available for purchase from Symantec as a bundled hardware solution.
Symantec’s decision to start selling the N8300 that bundles both software and hardware should not be construed as Symantec abandoning its decades-long commitment to provide storage software that works across and manages multiple storage hardware platforms. By and large, Symantec remains focused on continuing to provide software that works across and manages storage hardware from multiple providers.
However there are features of the Symantec FileStore software that make it desirable to package this software as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) hardware solution. The trends that are specifically driving this need for Symantec to offer FileStore as a hardware solution are:
- The continuing growth of unstructured data in enterprise organizations. An IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report released in Q4 2008 reported that unstructured data will grow at an annual rate of 61.7% versus an annual growth rate of “only” 21.8% for structured data. More recent surveys confirming that 2008 forecast are harder to come by but it appears to be holding true. A Q4 2010 Gartner survey of 1,000 companies revealed that nearly of half of them listed data growth as their primary challenge in 2011.
- Difficulty in establishing the value of unstructured data. The value of unstructured data is notoriously hard for enterprises to quantify. Everyone agrees that unstructured data has value otherwise why would they bother keep it in the first place? But there is no industry consensus as to what dollar value enterprises should assign to unstructured data so it is difficult for them to justify spending a premium on storage solutions to hold this data.
- Solutions that can start small and economically scale out. Year over year growth rates of over 60% amount to a lot of data in five (5) years time. If one has just 500 GBs of data at the start of year 1, by the end of year 5 that could easily grow to over 5 TBs. Further, many enterprises are already at a 100 or more TBs of unstructured data so at the end of five years their data stores could easily grow to over 10 PBs. As such, they need solutions that can start small and grow with them.
- Limited IT staff and time. As data stores grow, enterprises do not have more IT staff with more time to dedicate to managing this data. If anything, they have less people and time. As such, they need certified, preconfigured solutions that they can roll out on the floor, plug-in and immediately start hosting data while requiring little time to manage after deployment.
It is this combination of factors that has led to Symantec to conclude that by making its FileStore technology available in the form of the N8300, it can address all of these concerns that organizations have about cost-effectively storing and managing their unstructured data. The N8300 is a high performance, clustered NAS solution that is built upon the Storage Foundation Cluster File System while integrating with Symantec’s other enterprise software products which include Enterprise Vault, NetBackup and anti-virus software.
However of the four factors listed above, it may be last point made above that drove the Symantec FileStore N8300 offering. While the FileStore software itself is not necessarily time consuming or difficult to install and configure, enterprises previously needed to separately procure the server and storage hardware on which FileStore runs.
To those uninitiated with how enterprises operate, this may not sound like a big deal. But having once worked in an enterprise it can take weeks or even months to get new equipment purchased, received and installed.
Then even once the hardware is on the data center floor and powered on, change control records still need to be cut, permissions received to install, configure and test the software and then finally put it into production. By Symantec simply bundling and selling its software as the FileStore N8300, enterprises can cut one purchase order, get the solution they want and then put it into production without all of the internal headaches that can accompany integrating separate hardware and software purchases.
Further, just because Symantec is making the FileStore N8300 available as a bundled hardware solution does not mean that enterprises are losing the flexibility to choose any server or storage that they want. Enterprises can still buy FileStore software, put it on any server they want and add that server to an existing FileStore NAS configuration. Alternatively, they can purchase any storage from any vendor they want and put it behind the preconfigured Symantec FileStore to add extra storage capacity.
Symantec is still predominantly a storage hardware agnostic software company but Symantec’s decision to start offering the FileStore N8300 is a clear indication that Symantec had to adapt to changing customer preferences. One of these changing needs is that more enterprises need the flexibility to quickly bring in storage solutions to host their unstructured data while taking minimal time to purchase, setup, configure and put into production. The Symantec FileStore N8300 addresses these new customer concerns while in the process starting to shift how enterprises should view Symantec as a provider going forward.