DAS revs up for a resurgence - Storage Technology Magazine - Page 1

DAS revs up for a resurgence

Once seemingly headed to the great storage junkyard, DAS may well prove to be the classic car of the storage market as it re-emerges with improved performance and new Web 2.0-friendly uses.

DAS has hung around even after the advent of networked systems because it's cheap, easy to use and doesn't require nearly as much storage expertise as SAN management, making it much easier to find administrators for DAS.

"DAS is a huge part of the market and it gets no respect," says Lee Johns, director of marketing, Hewlett-Packard (HP) StorageWorks entry storage and storage blades. "Anytime anyone wants to talk about storage, they want to talk about the SAN." SAS drives replacing SCSI drives gave DAS a boost, he says. Johns says HP was seeing "a general sort of slow decline" in DAS adoption, but "the performance of small form-factor SAS drives has really helped" DAS pick up again.

"We're seeing innovation and growth in DAS business," says Praveen Asthana, global director of storage and networking at Dell. "[Vendors] are putting some storage functionality into the application itself." Asthana points to Microsoft Exchange 2007 as an example. "Instead of using a SAN back end, you can actually use a DAS back end," says Asthana.

Asthana predicts further DAS growth in the area

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register for SearchStorage.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics, the latest news and the biggest challenges you face as a storage professional today.

    Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchStorage.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchStorage.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

of clustered software, where "the node doesn't have to be a smart product, it can actually be a dumb DAS product."

"A lot of credit goes to Google" for building a data center with DAS, says Milan Shetti, president at Ibrix. "If they had to deploy a Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure, it would be very cost prohibitive."

Shetti says large repositories are where Ibrix sees a lot of its customers' DAS implementations. "If they have billions of files to store, then the economics of DAS are mindblowing," says Shetti. He thinks improved DAS performance has also driven renewed adoption.

HP's Johns says DAS can eliminate issues of ownership that arise among departments using shared storage. He points to blade servers, solid-state drives and virtualization as technologies that may drive continued DAS use. "I think you're going to find a lot of innovative DAS-based storage architectures coming out," says Johns.

This was first published in September 2008