Open Storage – assessing the pros and cons

The rise of open source software has changed the face of the server market… and now it’s the turn of data storage.  Open Storage – whereby industry-standard storage hardware components are combined with open source software – may hold the promise of big cost savings… but is it right for you?

IT strategy is virtually always a compromise between a number of key factors – including cost, performance, scalability, reliability and supportability.  Choose the lowest cost option and your solution may offer insufficient performance or may not scale easily to meet the eventual need for additional capacity.  On the other hand, for budgets where money is no object, you’d expect to get a solution that delivers high performance, scalability and reliability, and is readily supportable – the only compromise is the high cost.  However, in these challenging times, who has the luxury of such a budget?  So, compromise it is… and we all have to decide what levels of compromise we can accept for cost, performance, scalability, reliability and supportability.

Well, that was the accepted wisdom for server solutions, until open source software and commodity-level processor technology began to change the cost versus capability ratio.  Now, we’re beginning to see open storage doing the same for data storage environments… and it’s the result of a convergence in key enabling technologies.

OK… who’s supporting this?

In recent years, commodity-level storage hardware components have become much more reliable and capable of delivering hugely improved performance.  At the same time, the Open Storage Foundation (OSF) has been doing some great work and specialist software like Open ZFS has helped to make low-cost, sophisticated storage solutions possible.  Open ZFS may have been developed by Sun, but you’re free to use it on other vendors’ products – including HP and Dell.  By offering this level of flexibility, open storage is helping to consign expensive vendor ‘lock ins’ to the past. 

By using today’s highly capable, industry-standard components, together with open source software, open storage is driving down costs.  At the same time, the latest open storage solutions can also be highly scalable.  So that just leaves the question of supportability.

If you have the resources, open storage enables you to build your own DIY storage infrastructure, just the way you want it… with open source software and a choice of standard hardware, from a range of vendors.  If your tailor made solution works… that’s fine.  However, if there are any issues, who’s going to support it.  Will you be caught between finger pointing suppliers and open source organisations that each claim it’s the other guy’s fault?  Partly for this reason, vendors are already offering packaged, open storage solutions – which deliver the cost benefits of open storage, without the potential supportability issues.

Can open be too open?

For many in the industry, all things ‘open’ are to be welcomed.  However, the DIY open storage solution brings responsibilities and a need to extremely careful when architecting a storage solution.  Freedom to chose whose hardware and which software you combine might be attractive, but you could end up with an open solution that is a major burden on your support resources – especially if your needs later change and your storage environment has to adapt to meet new demands.

So, does that mean open storage could be too open?  Yes, perhaps in the wrong hands, open simply gives too much freedom to implement a DIY storage environment that becomes increasingly difficult to support over its lifecycle.  As with most IT decisions, it’s a matter of choosing the strategy that’s best for you – packaged, off-the-shelf open storage solutions or the DIY approach to open storage.  Whichever route you choose, open storage could make a massive contribution to reducing your IT costs.

What’s your view on open storage… are there pitfalls for the unwary… and is it possible for solutions to be too ‘open’ for their own good?