Top 10 Network Storage Innovations

Here's my list of what I think are the top 10 innovations in Storage Networking.  I decided to use a slightly different lens than Stephen Foskett, who wrote his top ten list of enterprise storage products. 

1. Netware 286. The first major file and print solution.  Despite what people at Sun think, Netware was more influential than NFS.  Microsoft ended up kicking Novell's butt, but the market and memes for LAN servers originated with Netware 286.
2. Network Appliance FASServer Filer.  The first major storage appliance.  Auspex was earlier, but Netapp innovated in many more ways and really defined almost everything NAS, including multi-protocol filing and file-based snapshots.
3. Brocade Silkworm.  The first Silkworm switches were the glue that allowed the fledgling Fibre Channel technology to work amazingly well.  Silkworms defined SAN fabric operations.
4. SAN Volume Controller.  The have been many attempts to make SAN-based virtualization work, but SVC has been by far the most succesful.  It set the standard for SAN virtualization. 
5. Digital DLT 2000. Although the DLT drives started life as VAX-oriented products, they had limited success until they burst on the scene in the late 90's as high performance, high capacity LAN backup drives.  They killed off most helical scan competitors and established linear tape as the overwhelming favorite.
6. Veritas Volume Manager.  Host-based software that let every admin with the courage and skills perform the logical configuration of storage. It allowed many people to understand volume management as a discrete technology area in network storage. 
7. EMC Symmetrix 3.0. The EMC Symm 3 with SRDF remote copy capabilities is probably the single most important innovation in the history of network storage. Block-based snapshots and multi-tenancy are also major innovations that EMC led the market with.
8. 3PAR InServ Storage Array. Its hard to sell SAN storage today without some form of Thin Provisioning.  In time, though, 3PAR's wide striping may prove to be more influential.
9. Data Domain.  Data deduplication is gaining ground very quickly in the network storage industry, thanks in large part to Data Domain's success and leadership. 
10. VMware VMFS.  The ability to maintain a logical data store for guest systems running in a virtualization server servers has been critical to the success of server virtualization.  

Here's a few honorable mentions:

Vortex Retrochron  - CDP that was way ahead of its time.
Palindrome Network Archivist  - Another product ahead of its time, with automated data archiving.
Seagate Barracuda FC - SANs wouldn't have happened if not for Seagate.
EqualLogic PS Series - Ease of installation/management makes SANs achievable for SMBs.

Comments

[Stephen Foskett]

There's that Vortex thingamajig again!

Just picking a bone: The FASServer stunk. I dug up a review of the thing (from SUN Expert!) in my pile of things I should have thrown out and was astonished by what it wasn't. In just one year, NetApp went from a basic, small RAID1-equipped PC to the seriously innovative line of expandable modular RAID4 NAS filers that they've stuck to ever since. Comparing a FASServer to an F330 is like night and day. There's a reason I bought the latter in 1996!

I gotta agree with most of the rest, and am not surprised to see 3PAR in here...

[Tony Asaro]

How far back do you need to go? Might as well add caching, RAID and disk drives in there, brother ;)

I think that one ingredient that Stephen F left out on "innovative" is that it also has to provide real value. Innovation without value is just a cool idea.

My innovation list is a bit different and more recent - not in any order here:

- Thin provisioning
- Data De-duplication
- Virtual volumes with large capacity pools
- Writeable snapshots
- Large, scalable file systems
- Storage virtualization - both the SVC and the USP-V
- Object-based storage (still not living up to its promise)
- Search and indexing of storage (also not living up to its promise)
- Clustered storage
- Global name space - having a single view and control of multiple file systems (also not living up to its potential)
- Spinning down drives - this makes it 11 but I do think this adds value and is innovative. We need to reduce power and cooling and this impacts that with backup and archived data.

Tony

[marc farley]

Stephen, The FASServer probably did suck - but it wasn't its wonderfulness or suckiness that I was promoting - it was it's appliance-ness.

TA - nice to hear from you! Yes, I thought about putting copper cabling in my list too. :)

[Chris Fricke]

I may be biased but I think EqualLogic deserves more than an honorable mention (maybe two honorable mentions?). They were definitely not the first at any one thing technology-wise but the way they brought iSCSI to market as an all inclusive super simple and absolutely effective virtualized array has had major impact in that storage space.

Basically they took the scare out of iSCSI before most storage guys really understood what iSCSI was. If that's not innovation I don't know what is.

[marc farley]

Yes, I agree - you are biased! But I am too and think EQLC deserves more recognition than they get for their technology. iSCSI redirection - not copied much, distributed volume manager - not copied much, truly amazing installation wizards - again not copied much. Very innovative stuff, but not as influential as most of the other things listed here.

[Bill]

I disagree that Symm 3.0 was a Networked Storage innovation. Symm 3.0 was a shared DAS, using SCSI and ESCON.

On a related note, I've got a real nit to pick about the term SAN. Not that you are misusing it, but that others routinely do so.

SAN refers to the network itself, and loosely can refer to the devices on the SAN. But SAN never refers to the storage device itself in a standalone sense. I hear technologists in major companies refer to "upgrading the 3PAR SAN firmware" or "We have tried the CLARiiON SAN but prefer the DMX SAN". Nonsense!

So, I may be too strict, but while Symm 3.0 was a great storage innovation, it wasn't a Networked storage innovation, unless you are referring to the ability to network 2 Symms together using proprietary protocols (SRDF) for the purposes of data replication.

[marc farley]

OK..... Good point on the Symm 3.... I guess it would have to be a later model then.

As for abusing the word "SAN", I used to agree with your point, Bill, but then I went to work for EqualLogic, where everybody there referred to their arrays as "SANs" - even the VP of engineering who was (otherwise) brilliant. It drove me crazy! Anyway I'm sure I've used the term this way too.

We use the terms LAN and SAN ambiguously. We don't call network servers LANs, but we do refer to all the equipment connected to the network as "the LAN". Similarly, we refer to all the products on a Fibre Channel or iSCSI network as "the SAN". For instance, "We put our files on the LAN so everybody could watch them instead of doing their jobs". Storage terminology is just destined to be a mosh pit.

[Martin G]

The problem with defining innovation as useful is that what is not useful today, may be useful tomorrow.

'A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house'

Not quite appropriate but not far off....oh, the value of a Catholic education.

[Bruce Norikane]

You can't leave ESCON out of the storage network innovations.

First use of optical links for storage, first block storage network, first switched storage network, first use of serial I/O to disk systems. Most of the in Fibre Channel concepts came from ESCON.

(and you can put the Symm back in. It was an ESCON disk.)

[marc farley]

No doubt that ESCON came along first, and I agree that it was definitely innovative, but I'm not convinced it trumps FC as an innovation. The thing that pushed FC's development as a SAN was Seagate's need to supplant SSA as a device interface. The fact that the open systems world was able to connect lots of drives inside a storage system was a huge benefit that ESCON never had. It's doubtful that FC would have attained a critical mass if not for its incorporation of device-oriented loop topology. So while I agree with you Bruce about ESCON being first, I don't agree that it was supremely innovative. Influential - yes, innovative - yes, but it still doesn't make my list.

[Bruce Norikane]

Marc,

Good point on FC as a front end and back end interface. ESCON is strictly host to disk controller. The disk drives with FC interfaces really drove down the FC component cost which helped bring down the price of the network components as well.

[Pablo Ruiz]

If you have Veritas Volume Manager in the list, you gotta have Sun ZFS file system too. ZFS is what Veritas VM wants to be when it grows up.