Overview
Bycast is a pretty well kept secret, primarily known as a DICOM-compliant long term digital medical archive solution provider. Its software is primarily sold through HP as HP Medical Archive Solution (MAS) and IBM as IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS). It is a less well known fact that Bycast’s software also powers a well known Tier 1 online cloud-based archive solution.
This acquisition is certainly strategic for NetApp with a solid entry in object-based, scalable, policy-based storage management. It is complementary to the existing NetApp storage portfolio since it sits as an application above the storage systems and virtualizes the storage environment. Key to the Bycast StorageGRID offering is its ability to manage geographically dispersed storage clusters and set policies for how and where data is stored, including storage tiering across everything from Tier 1 big iron platforms all the way across the price/performance spectrum to tape. It has encryption, authentication, and security features designed to be used in stringent HIPAA-compliant environments, which could also translate to broader cloud-based compliance solutions over time.
Bycast’s StorageGRID software provides unified management of a diverse, heterogeneous storage pool in which users can decide—based on policy—which types of storage fit the bill for different data types. StorageGRID is a highly available scale-out platform that can be implemented in a single facility or geographically distributed, but is still managed from a single interface with a global namespace. Thanks to its grid-based implementation, the associated storage ecosystem has no practical limit for scalability. Thanks to the global namespace, users are insulated from the challenge of accessing data as it is moved across tiers of storage—it is all done under the covers, completely transparent to users.
The platform is well suited to digital media and not just for medical archiving. It is also suitable for Web 2.0 applications, life sciences, earth sciences, etc.—anything that generates a lot of large files. The issue for Bycast has been to expand outside of medical archiving in a very challenging economy; one that is go-to-market, not product, focused. For a small company like Bycast, opening new markets requires massive investment and focus. It is not a cheap undertaking, no matter how compelling the solution. The company is fairly small and, as such, had to fight to be heard and to parlay the vertical success it has had in medical archiving into horizontal success in the general archive market. With NetApp, Bycast now has an entrée into enterprise accounts that it would not have achieved on its own.
Why Bycast is Important to NetApp
Cloud storage holds tremendous promise as a way to manage burgeoning enterprise data. Any device connected to the Internet now has the potential to create, access, move, find, manipulate, delete, store, or manage online digital content. In this era, everyone—via most every conceivable device—can be connected to everyone else, eliminating geographic boundaries that previously existed. Corporations will be responsible for creating the policies and methods that ensure the proper use and protection of digital assets.
That’s where object-based storage comes in. The massive amounts of information that users are now, or will be in coming years, struggling to manage requires a new storage paradigm, one that is largely policy-based. IT will ultimately fold if it continues with “business as usual”—throwing capacity at performance problems, deploying stovepiped storage systems, and relying on the long laundry list of manual tasks that make up a storage administrator’s job. Object-based systems store data in a variably-sized “container” that holds both data and metadata. Object storage systems bring the ability to wrap objects with advanced metadata that can then be leveraged for policy-based automated storage tasks: data migration, tiering, retention, disposition, security, and protection. Put another way, the metadata can be leveraged to determine how and where data is stored, for how long, and who can access it. For businesses, that means data can automatically be stored on the most cost effective media and only as long as required, keeping data growth and management somewhat in check. That’s what Bycast brings to the table.
It is important to note, however, that most object-based systems require application integration or modification to operate in today’s IT environments; they can’t just be dropped like standards-based NAS systems. Bycast StorageGRID does not have that challenge; it supports both DICOM for medical archiving and NFS, which is how the vast majority of its installations use it. Therefore, StorageGRID has not seen an issue there and does not face the challenges with proprietary APIs that has slowed broad adoption of object-based systems.
Positioning
NetApp will continue to offer StorageGRID as a software-only solution for the time being. Relative to NetApp’s GX clustered storage offering, expect NetApp to position Bycast StorageGRID:
- For massive scale as a distributed object repository.
- For management of tens of petabytes of capacity and billions of objects.
- For geographically dispersed clusters, suitable for content distribution.
- As an automated, policy-based solution with the ability to set policies that define how data is treated (migrating data across platforms or geographies according to policies, defining how many copies of data are stored where, setting policies for retention and disposition of data).
NetApp will likely continue to position its GX-based scale-out cluster for single site parallel data services designed to support massive throughput applications and scale in the hundreds of terabyte to single digit petabyte range.
On the surface, this move could be seen as counter to NetApp’s unified storage strategy that offers one set of management tools, policies, and procedures across everything in its line. But it is important to remember that StorageGRID has a robust policy engine that addresses areas NetApp does not with SANscreen and OnTAP—authentication, security, retention, and disposition—and as a software layer, these capabilities can be stretched across the entire product line in a unified fashion. NetApp will need to work to bring these products together, but on the surface, they are more complementary than competitive.
The Bigger Truth
Lots of hats have been thrown into the object storage ring, all targeted at providing large-scale cloud solutions both public and private. EMC was one of the first with Centera, followed by Atmos. Recently, Dell announced a scale-out object storage platform it will target towards health care, file and e-mail archiving, e-discovery, and content management that it will ship in the first half of this year with a cloud system to follow. Smaller companies like Panasas and Cleversafe are slowly getting traction. IBM is betting on scale-out file services (via SONAS and SOFS), but it would not surprise anyone to see IBM (or HP, for that matter) come out with an object-based solution over time. Object systems enable the massive scale that could ultimately propel cloud storage—it is just too difficult to manage systems at tens to hundreds of petabytes of data. Some scale-out systems, like Isilon or even NetApp GX-based solutions, can scale into hundreds of terabytes and tens of petabytes, but when it comes to enabling advanced policy-based automation and geographically dispersed clusters, going the object route may just be what it takes to get there thanks to rich metadata and flat global namespace.
Bycast has a solid product, but the company’s size was an inhibitor to adoption; with NetApp offering the product, that challenge goes away. There is a ton of potential in this deal, but NetApp does not have a strong track record when it comes to integrating acquired technology. NetApp could learn a thing or two from EMC and Cisco here—don’t fix what isn’t broken (the product), concentrate on what is (the go-to-market channels). Incent the channel to carry Bycast StorageGRID as a defensive deal against EMC Atmos and invest in growing the StorageGRID business as a complementary offering while working on integrating the underlying management components. It’s much easier said than done, but if NetApp applies lessons learned from past acquisitions, it has an opportunity to take a giant step forward in its push towards becoming a major cloud storage infrastructure supplier.
