January 1, 2001

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Storage Appliances Find A Home With Internet Companies

By Alan Radding

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etwork Appliance Inc. took the appliance concept--a single-function device combining hardware and software in an easy-to-install and easy-to-maintain package--and applied it to storage in 1992, creating the storage appliance. The vendor separated storage from the server and stuck it directly into the network, an early example of a new approach to storage: network-attached storage. It also optimized the device for fast storage access and information delivery, making it ideal for Internet use.

By 2000, the company had grown to $579 million in annual sales, a staggering 1,143% increase over 1996 revenue. Storage appliances appear poised to become the next technology to shake up the entrenched storage industry.

With Network Appliance offering systems that handle 12 terabytes of data storage and high availability clustering, storage appliances are capable of handling the largest enterprises.

EMC Corp., the enterprise storage industry leader, recently revealed a storage appliance of its own. The EMC offerings attempt to raise the storage-appliance bar and counter Network Appliance's enterprise storage products by combining network-attached storage and a storage area network into a single offering. The EMC units can scale to 3.6 terabytes in a rack-mounted configuration and promises easy-to-install high-availability failover. IBM and Compaq will also offer enterprise-class storage appliances.

Whether or not storage appliances make inroads into large companies, they are just what fast-growing Internet businesses need. "We started with a conventional RAID system, but it started to crash as the number of physical files increased," says Matt Mankins, chief technology officer of Emu Mail Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., E-mail outsourcing vendor. It turned to Network Appliance instead. All Emu Mail had to do was plug in some network cards, configure the Network File System, and the system was running. The company now runs about 1 terabyte of storage across two Network Appliance devices.

In terms of cost, "the storage devices run a little more than the RAID system," Mankins says, "but RAID would crash and could take 15 hours to reboot," which was unacceptable. He reports that during the 18 months that Emu Mail has run Network Appliance devices, they have never even hiccuped.

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Illustration by Terry Eden

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