Everybody's talking about storage networks but nobody's talking about specifics. We found one ISP and its equipment provider that were willing to talk turkey about the details of an ISP storage network.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [February 13, 2003]

Large ISPs across the world are deploying Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) storage technologies to improve a variety of services, especially mail, but most do not want to talk about it. Because the storage network market still has a wide variety of products, most ISPs seem to think that their unique system is a competitive advantage and must be kept secret. So we were pleased to find one vendor able to talk about a storage network at an ISP.

We spoke to Auspex about the company's relationship with the ISP Easynet France. Easynet France is a part of the Easynet group, which is based in the UK. Easynet France hosts about 60,000 mailboxes and 3,000 websites. It delivers about 300,000 e-mail messages each day.

Auspex provides massive, powerful servers that enable ISPs like Easynet France to consolidate their Internet activity in one location. "The key in this architecture is load balancing," says Mark Amerlang, Auspex director of field and industry marketing. "If everybody is going to one place, load balancing is easier."

Auspex sells intelligence NAS servers that can handle a variety of different types of requests. The server can send a file out in NFS or CIFS depending on which format the requestor needs. Notes Amerlang, "the system has to know who's asking for the file, which format to send, and, in the Internet world, it's important to know which version is the most current."

Adds Lawrence Didsbury, director of product marketing, "many ISPs now offer services on both Apache and Microsoft IIS. If you can serve data for all of those from the same location (and for any other services you offer, such as FTP, Cold Fusion, or USENET news), you'll lower your administration costs."

Easynet France consolidated from 50 storage nodes to 2 and although it did not lay off anyone, it was able to grow from 30,000 mailboxes to 60,000 mailboxes without requiring additional technical staff.

In the past, the network had become congested because various services were not load balanced. HTTP, mail, and e-commerce traffic competed for bandwidth, causing congestion at peak usage hours. Benjamin Ryzman, research and development manager for Easynet France, said, "we used to see delays of as much as 20 minutes in mail delivery during exceptional busy periods. Now we get instantaneous delivery all of the time."

Amerlang explained that Auspex servers have three processors, increasing reliability. The host processor administers the server itself, a network processor is dedicated to handling file requests, and a file system processor finds and retrieves the requested files. "Everybody else does simultaneous multiprocessing, where each processor can do all the tasks," Amerlang claimed. "With our architecture, you can add more network processors if you receiving a large number requests, or you can add more file system processors if you're handling large files."

Didsbury says that in product demonstrations, he can remove the host processor and the server will keep serving files. Without the host processor, users cannot be added or deleted, however.

Easynet France uses Auspex's NS2000 NAS file server, the company's midrange product. It stores between 0.5 TB and 2 TB of data, and can handle files as large as 1 TB (i.e., larger than you should ever need on this system). The NS2000 can equip up to 36 GB of read cache and 384 MB of NVRAM in its file system cache. Administrators can use Auspex's Control Point browser-based GUI or administer the system in Sun's Solaris environment. The server can have up to 36 10/100 Base T Ethernet connections, up to 6 Gigabit Ethernet connections, and up to 3 ATM connections.

The company claims a single server provides 99.99 percent reliability, and a pair provide 99.999 percent reliability.

The company's bottom of the line product, the Brat, is a NAS-server-on-wheels and is priced starting at $50,000. The NS2000 generally runs between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on the options selected.

Amerlang says that futuristic storage networks now combine the best of the NAS and SAN worlds, with a NAS storage controller at the front end serving files to users, and a SAN at the back end serving block-level data to databases and interacting with individual users through the NAS. A NAS controller starts at $40,000.

Didsbury says that some companies, even small ones, have surprisingly large SAN systems left over from the boom days. "If you have a 10 TB SAN and you've only used 5 TB in the first year, you could by a NAS controller for $40,000 and have access to up to 5 TB. In the old revenue model, you would have bought a separate NAS server for as much as $200,000."

For companies that are expanding quickly, Didsbury says it makes sense to buy a NAS controller that can work equally well with a cookie-cutter SAN ordered from a website and a multi million dollar SAN for the future.

Thus Auspex, a NAS specialist, becomes involved in SAN deployment, and the storage networking universe continues to change in unexpected ways.

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