What's Up With NearStore?

I'm on a 747 flying home from Salzburg, Austria where we hosted executive forums with customers, resellers and distributors. One customer asked, "What's up with your NearStore products? Isn't the NearStore R200 getting a little long in the tooth?"

For those who don't have our product line memorized, the NearStore R200 is a storage system based on slow and cheap ATA disks that are less reliable than the Fibre Channel drives we use for primary storage. The system is optimized for data retention and data protection. We call it near-line storage because it is faster and more reliable than off-line storage like tapes, but much less expensive than primary storage. Less expensive, and nearly as good. We introduced this concept several years ago, and it has been wildly successful. Last quarter, 60% of the terabytes we shipped were ATA drives. (See this blog post for an explanation of why you really need a double protecting RAID, aka RAID 6, to make ATA drives safe to use.)

Some people do use NearStore as primary storage for less critical applications, just to save money, but the more common use is to hold secondary copies of data—data that is also stored elsewhere on a primary storage system. These secondary copies can be used for D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape backup), long-term archiving, and regulatory compliance.

So why haven't we introduced an R300? The reason is that our current generation of storage platforms supports both ATA and Fibre Channel. If you want near-line storage on the latest and greatest platforms, just buy a FAS3000 or a FAS6000 series and order it with ATA drives. (We call this NearStore on FAS.)

In addition, when we launched our VTL (Virtual Tape Library) product, we called it NearStore VTL, because disk-based virtual tape is another case where you want near-line storage that is better than tape but not as expensive as primary storage.

I'd like to share an argument that I had years ago with Jerry Lopatin, who was the driving force behind our first NearStore products. (Jerry has since left NetApp and runs engineering and manufacturing at ONStor.)

My view was that NearStore was all about making storage cheaper, since ATA drives are cheaper than Fibre Channel. Jerry disagreed. He felt that, in the long run, the software that we developed to use these inexpensive storage systems would be much more interesting. He argued that if we could drive the cost of disk-based storage down, we would have the opportunity to create whole new ways of thinking about data protection and data retention based on disks instead of tape, and—in the end—the software we developed to do this would be what mattered most.

Today we have several families of software that use disks in new ways, including data protection, data archiving, and regulatory compliance. As I said above, many people do use ATA-based systems for primary storage, and I expect that will become more and more common over time, but what's much more exciting to me is that—along with EMC's Centera product—we are helping to create a whole new market based on clever ways of managing secondary copies of storage.

Summary: Jerry was right; I was wrong.