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Ethernet Storage: State of the Market Today and Looking Ahead
Since the recession that started in 2008, demand for storage – in comparison with other technologies – has proved remarkably robust. Late 2008 and early 2009 saw an overall downturn, but the storage market was less affected than other sectors. In the latter half of 2009, it has grown substantially, and as we approach the end of 2010, all the evidence points towards sustained recovery and growth. By Alex McDonald, Co-Chair SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum NFS SIG, NetApp.
According to the most recent IDC Worldwide Storage Systems Hardware tracker published in September (covering H1 2010), during the first six months of 2010 Ethernet Storage revenues (Network Attached Storage (NAS), plus Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI)) grew 48% to $3.591 billion, from $2.425 billion for the same period in 2009. This compares with 26% revenue growth for the Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) market as a whole (Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (FC SAN), iSCSI SAN and NAS) for the same period. For the first half of 2010, the revenue market share of Ethernet Storage has climbed to 45%, up from 39% in 2009 and 32% in 2008.
In terms of capacity shipped, the story is even better. During the first half of 2010, vendors shipped an astonishing 2,171 PB of Ethernet Storage – compared with 2,872 PB for the whole of 2009. Sales of Ethernet Storage capacity climbed to 47% in 2009, up from 42% in 2008 and 37% in 2007. 2010 looks set to increase that capacity share to well in excess 50% of the total market.
A significant proportion of the growth of Ethernet-based storage in late 2009 and 2010 was also being driven by new compute and storage models, particularly a move away from silos of servers and storage to a shared and virtualized
infrastructure.These are new and different use cases from traditional storage acquisitions, and they are driving change inside the data center towards a converged data center fabric, where Ethernet-based storage has an increasingly important role.
10 Gigabit Ethernet And Beyond In June 2002, the standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE)
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(IEEE 802.3ae) was approved. Positioned as a high-speed unifying technology for networking applications in Local Area Networks (LANs), Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), and Wide Area Networks (WANs), 10GbE increased Ethernet bandwidth to match the speed of the fastest technology on the WAN backbone (OC-192, which runs at about 9.5 Gb/s) and extended native Ethernet from LANs to MANs and WANs.
10GbE is the current generation of Ethernet, and supports all the network services that operate at Layer 2, 3, and higher of the OSI model, e.g.,Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), spanning trees, quality of service, voice over IP, security, etc. Products have been available in the market since 2003, but the past 18 months has seen the emergence of built-in 10GbE ports on commodity server platforms which has propelled the technology into the IT mainstream for server connections. Consequently, 10GbE options on high-end NAS and iSCSI storage systems are commonplace.
In June 2010, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) also ratified two new Ethernet standards; 40GbE and
100GbE.The decision to include both speeds is to support 40GbE for local server applications and 100GbE for backbones. A variety of physical interconnects are supported, from short run copper to longer run optical, but given the shorter distances supported and the change in physical medium away from copper twisted pair, adoption is likely to be in the data center. As was the case with the 10GbE standard, there were no changes to the underlying 802.3 Ethernet standards.
40GbE and 100GbE provide the next step for supporting highly utilized shared compute and storage cloud; without
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