Microsoft serves up new NAS offering

It dominates the software portion of the x86 server market in India. Now Microsoft wants to do the same in the NAS market. Prashant L Rao examines the company’s chances of succeeding in the uncharted waters of entry-level network-attached storage (NAS)

Yasir Yousuff says customers should use WSS NAS boxes to replace NT file and print servers as they can replace five or ten old NT boxes with one WSS appliance

Windows Server is the dominant commercial platform for entry-level servers in India. Two out of every three server OS units shipped are of Windows Server. Sure, that doesn’t take into account all those free copies of Linux loaded as a mail or Web server tucked away in some corner of the server room, unknown to even the CIO, but we’re talking about paid software here. A combination of factors—delays in the release of the next version of SQL Server, the high comfort levels of Indian organisations with Windows 2000 and resistance to changes in Microsoft’s software licensing policies—have all combined to slow down migration to Windows 2003. Even today, many companies buy a Windows 2003 license only to downgrade it and install Windows 2000 (which Microsoft allows, by the way). While that’s expected to change when the new avatar of SQL Server gets launched later this year, Microsoft, never one to sit waiting, has set its sights on the burgeoning storage market.

The storage segment is growing much faster than, say, servers. IDC estimates that the Indian storage market will grow at a CAGR of 65 percent till 2007. Contrast that with projections of 10-12 percent for the UNIX server market and 15-16 percent for the standard Intel architecture server (SIAS) market. The server market is growing at a healthy pace but storage is exploding. Recognising this fact, Microsoft’s latest version of Windows Server is aimed at the entry-level NAS market.

Microsoft is attempting to extend its beachhead in the SIAS market to NAS. It used to sell a product called Windows-powered NAS. That didn’t exactly set the market on fire. So Microsoft has rejigged and rebranded it as Windows Storage Server (WSS). There’s much more than a mere name change here though. WSS is a fairly robust storage platform, so much so that storage majors EMC and HP are solidly behind it.

SAN players play ball

“The total external storage market in India was worth $87.15 million in 2003. Of this, the Indian NAS market accounted for $16.77 million,” says Sanjit Sinha, head-hardware and channel research at IDC India. IDC puts the top three players in the Indian NAS segment as Network Appliance, HP and IBM, in that order, with NetApp dominating the NAS space. The obvious conclusion is that while NAS is a substantial sub-segment of the overall storage market, Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors (all the storage majors barring NetApp) haven’t had much luck at tapping this segment so far. That’s why vendors such as HP and EMC have released entry-level WSS-based NAS boxes. EMC had its own NAS boxes but these have been mid-range or high-end equipment. HP’s been strong in the SAN market with its XP and EVA arrays. For both vendors, WSS gives them a quick way to get a fairly robust and feature rich entry-level NAS box onto the market at a very competitive price point.

EMC is selling NetWin 200, a NAS box that uses WSS 2003 as the ‘front-end’. “It’s an integrated piece of hardware with two Intel Xeon processors running WSS 2003. The back-end storage is CLARiiON in terms of disks and software, etc.,” says Arun Rawtani, country TSG manager, EMC–India.

“This product is targeted at the low-end market of small enterprises or departments and branch offices of a large enterprise. They may not have an administrator and don’t want to go through a high learning curve. Most of our NetWin 200 deployments are in the range of 500 GB. Typically, this isn’t meant for companies that plan to have several TB by next year, those companies look at our mid-range NS 600 and 700 boxes,” adds Rawtani.

“These appliances can be used for any file server consolidation on a multi-protocol environment, or in a remote office deployment,” says Avijit Basu, marketing manager-Network Storage Solution, HP India. Apart from software development houses (Trinity Software uses HP’s WSS-based NAS appliances) banking, manufacturing, service-oriented companies and insurance players are evincing interest in these boxes for departmental or branch office set-ups. “Cost effective replication and disaster recovery will be popular applications in the near future,” predicts Basu.

Among the SAN majors, IBM is going in a different direction. It had three NAS boxes, the NAS25T, 300G and G27. It has dropped two, keeping the NAS 300G (a modified x225 server running a variant of Windows 2000) on the market. “Windows 2003 incorporates most of those NAS features. The NAS gateway was an xSeries box running customised Windows with NAS extensions. Now these extensions are mostly in the standard edition of Windows 2003. So you might as well use a regular xSeries server running Windows 2003,” says Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-Storage, IBM India.

NAS numero uno says "no!"

Microsoft will add features and WSS will grow in terms of scalability, software capability and reliability in the future based on that, storage vendors will add to their hardware, says Arun Rawtani

Typically, we don’t compete in that space. The average WSS deployment is about 1 TB. Earlier, it was a Windows powered OS, that was different only by way of licensing. It was not optimised for network or I/O performance,” says Sandeep Dutta, director-Strategic Partnerships & Marketing, Network Appliance India, explaining why the NAS market leader chose not to offer a WSS- based box. Considering that Network Appliance accounted for $3.2 million of the $4.7 million overall Indian NAS market in Q4 2003, its lack of support for WSS is going to make Microsoft’s job that much harder.

NetApp offers Snapshots in a CFS environment so that the user can pull back data. “You can have up to 255 snapshots per volume. This lets you take hourly snapshots of the user’s HOME directory. You can go into the snapshot directory and recover the version that you want. This feature has been around for the last 12 years,” comments Dutta.

That said, WSS-based hardware has one key advantage—price. The cost of a WSS-box is much lower than a traditional filer. It also does less but that could and is likely to change over time.

Displacing PC servers?

Microsoft is pitching WSS as a plug-and-play platform for dedicated file and print services, recovery back-up for any application across a LAN or WAN (from one WSS box to another) and for file server consolidation. This is the third generation of Windows-based NAS. Traditionally, three is Microsoft’s lucky number (Windows NT 3 and Windows 3.0 were both smash hits). The pricing is competitive, ranging from sub-$1,000 to $5,000. Capacities go from 160 GB to multiple terabytes.

“Windows Storage Server is a dedicated file and print server based on the core of Windows 2003. It can integrate seamlessly into an existing Active Directory Services (ADS) or Windows server network. All the plus points of Windows 2003 extend to it. It’s an OEM-only appliance server operating system meant only for the NAS market. We recommend that you use WSS NAS boxes to replace NT file and print servers as you can replace five or ten old NT boxes with one WSS appliance,” says Yasir Yousuff, senior marketing manager, Windows Server Platforms, Microsoft India.

Volume Shadow Copy is Microsoft’s version of NetApp’s Snapshot feature. It ensures that incremental back-ups of files are stored on the appliance so that data can be restored even if you end up saving a file instead of doing a ‘Save As’. Windows 2003 has about 15 roles when you set it up. When you boot WSS it takes you to only the file and print role, making it much easier to set up. Windows Terminal services can be used to remote manage WSS boxes. It can even act as a SAN gateway or as a disc-based back-up solution.

Microsoft’s chances

Microsoft has a good chance of getting a foothold in the Indian NAS market, albeit in the entry-level portion. WSS and products built around it could potentially end up replacing the PC server that is the backbone of branch computerisation in India. That’s a huge market where Microsoft is facing stiff competition from a resurgent Novell and Linux players such as Red Hat, not to mention it’s own older OSes—Windows NT and 2000.

For now, NAS filers are safe. NetApp’s boxes outclass WSS boxes significantly. That could change over time. “Microsoft will add features and WSS will grow in terms of scalability, software capability and reliability. Based on that, storage vendors will add to their hardware. Today, it can support 100-200 users. Tomorrow it could scale to support 400 users,” says Rawtani.

Entry-level NAS may not account for a substantial part of the market by revenues yet, but in unit terms the market has considerable potential. “This is where volume are. We will strongly push our WSS-based NAS 2000s and 4000s boxes. We are positioning the 1200s for remote offices,” says Basu.

Today, the buyer profile for WSS-based NAS appliances is dominated by pure Windows users. “Normal Windows servers have other overheads. This is I/O tuned software,” says Rawtani. Having the same look and feel and administration tools as Windows 2003 is both WSS’ biggest selling point and its Achilles heel. UNIX mavens won’t cosy up to it anytime soon. This point is underscored by pundits who say that Microsoft needs to improve Network File System (NFS) performance on WSS before India Inc. takes it seriously. India is still heavily UNIX country in the mid-tier and back-end and unless WSS can offer NFS performance comparable with the incumbent (NetApp) it won’t make a dent in the mid-range market. Microsoft is aware of this and it claims to have improved NFS performance in WSS over Windows-powered NAS (the previous version). You can bet your last rupee that the next version of WSS will attempt to push Microsoft into the mid-range NAS market. For now, replacing all those Windows NT and 2000 boxes is good enough for Microsoft.

prashant@expresscomputeronline.com