Taxing Government Storage Systems
DATA Explosion Taxing Government Storage Systems By Ed McKenna To keep up with consumer demand for weather information online, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution opted to upgrade its satellite archives from older tape technology to advanced, high-capacity tape. The office, which provides satellite data to government cus
DATA Explosion
Taxing Government Storage Systems
By Ed McKenna
To keep up with consumer demand for weather information online, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution opted to upgrade its satellite archives from older tape technology to advanced, high-capacity tape.
Tom Samulewicz, director of strategic planning at Unisys' open systems program |
The company almost exclusively sells through systems integrators, including Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas, GTE Government Systems of Needham, Mass., and resellers such as Chantilly, Va.-based Government Technology Services Inc.
In addition to central control, organizations are solving their storage needs by matching existing storage technologies to their needs. "Typically when you're looking at storage media selections you're looking at a trade-off of performance vs. cost," said IBM's Fessler.
At the low end of the scale is magnetic tape, which is viewed as "somewhat of an insurance policy," said Battaglia. Because tape drives are too slow to handle data that must be continuously accessed, tape is used primarily for archiving large amounts of data to take advantage of its low cost and high capacity.
The need for greater data availability, though, is driving advances in tape technology, such as the speedier Digital Linear Tape drives developed by Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass.
Paul Battaglia, federal sales director for Storage Dimensions Top Disk Storage Subsystems Suppliers Worldwide |
For applications requiring high data availability, however, most organizations use disk storage or, more specifically, RAID or redundant array of independent disks technology. Introduced in 1987, RAID devices comprise a cluster of disk drives that work together to deliver performance surpassing that of a single large disk. The systems are rated at different levels between 0 and 5, reflecting a balance of performance and data protection with RAID 5 being the most commonly used.
Many, if not all, government departments use RAID storage systems. "I would venture to guess that [our RAID systems] are probably being used in all of the cabinet agencies [including] the executive office of the president," said Battaglia. Storage Dimensions products are available on large contract vehicles, such as the National Institutes of Health Electronic Computer Store Contract and the General Services Administration schedule through companies including BTG Inc., Fairfax, Va.; GTSI; and FedTek, Lake Ridge, Va.
The Department of Defense's On-Site Inspection Agency is currently deploying Storage Dimensions' RAID subsystems to handle its expanding storage needs. Responsible for monitoring of arms control reduction treaties, OSIA has a worldwide network with about 1,200 users, said Bill Earles, senior systems architect for OSIA.
With data volume growing about 1 percent a day over the past few years, the organization opted for the Storage Dimensions' Dynamic Growth and Reconfiguration RAID subsystem, which will more than double the organization's storage capacity. Capable of holding 45 gigabytes of data, the new systems use ultra SCSI connections, which are twice as fast as OSIA's previous systems, which used regular SCSI (small computer system interface) technology.
As impressive as OSIA's performance improvements are, many observers predict by the end of the year they will pale in comparison to the performance of new fibre channel systems. An American National Standards Institute communications standard, fibre channel is a fast serial bus interface standard intended to replace SCSI on high-end servers.
"The standard we have today is ultra SCSI, which offers us 40 megabytes per second throughput," said Battaglia. "Fibre promises to bring us 100 megabytes, but we're not quite there yet."
But he and many other industry officials believe it's just on the horizon.
"On the drive side, the technical difficulties have been overcome, it is just a matter of what you're going to hook it up to," said John Monroe, chief analyst for rigid disk drives worldwide for Dataquest.
Many companies are betting there will be systems to connect it to this year. For example, Unisys' new PrimeStor NAS2000 RAID network attached storage system introduced early this year is completely fibre channel.
"We skipped going to SCSI [altogether]," said Tom Samulewicz, director of strategic planning at Unisys' open systems program. The NAS2000 is Windows NT and Intel-based and is simple to administer, Samulewicz said, adding that operators don't have to go off line to add capacity.
Currently able to scale to 568 gigabytes, the system will increase to 1 terabyte capacity by June, he said. Unisys is adding the product to its GSA schedule. Meanwhile, the Essex County Registry of Deeds, Mass., has already acquired a NAS2000 for use in storing and managing land-title documents.
Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, Calif., also introduced in January its new full fibre channel Sun StorEdge A5000. A pioneer in fibre channel technology, Sun co-founded in 1993 the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative with Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., and IBM, and began shipping early the fibre channel product Sparcstorage in 1994.
"As the market and the end users become aware of the fibre channel technology, you're going to see a mass migration to it," Samulewicz predicted. Aside from faster throughput, the technology allows for greater connectivity allowing you to attach to 126 devices as opposed to up to 15 on SCSI, he said. In addition, cables for fibre channel can be as long as 30 meters (coaxial) or 10 kilometers (optical) allowing storage systems to be located much farther away from the data center than with SCSI connections.
Introducing its Fibre Box in late 1996, Box Hill also is seeking an early stake in the fibre channel market. "We haven't got anybody [in government] who is using fibre channel yet, but we're seeing a lot of interest from a number of places, not the least being NASA," said Black.
The IRS, which relies heavily on storage technologies to serve the public, is having difficulties dealing with how its growing database is taxing its computer network.
"There has been more information to back up, but the technology for us has pretty much matched it," said Tom Lucas, senior adviser in the government program management office at IRS. "I think the greatest strain is on the networks. There is much more data to transfer over the large geographic distances."
"We have linked many of our systems together and use the telecommunications network to provide nationwide access first to a read-only copy of our master file data," he said "We [also] link together many of our disparate service center systems, so people in one center can access data that's in other centers," he said. However, there have been some problems with time synchronization of the data with different centers having differing data versions, he added.
Current plans to overhaul IRS information systems over the next few years are likely to correct the situation. Under the IRS Prime contract, currently being bid, there will be "a lot more centralization for us - a lot more centralized control and consistency of data," said Lucas.
As the income tax filing season gets under way this year, IRS systems again will be tested with the expected surge in electronic tax filings.
About 21 million Americans are expected to file electronically, a 10 percent increase over last year's total of 19 million or one in six taxpayers. At the same time, taxpayers are not only using computers to file, but are also going online to the IRS World Wide Web site for forms, information and advice. As a result, the agency is managing a flood of electronic data.
But the IRS is not alone. Every major government department has a Web site offering such information as airline safety records, medical research results and satellite weather data. All of which is good news for the booming storage industry.
1997 Rank | Supplier | 1997 Revenue ($ millions) | 1997 Market share(%) | 1995 Revenue ($ millions) | 1995 Market share(%) | 1995Rank |
1 | IBM | 3,887 | 15.7 | 4,224 | 20.1 | 1 |
2 | Compaq | 2,900 | 11.7 | 1,270 | 6 | 3 |
3 | EMC | 2,528 | 10.2 | 1,591 | 7.6 | 2 |
4 | Sun | 1,672 | 6.8 | 865 | 4.1 | 8 |
5 | Digital | 1,640 | 6.6 | 1,253 | 6 | 4 |
6 | Hewlett-Packard | 1,599 | 6.5 | 1,203 | 5.7 | 5 |
7 | NEC | 1,102 | 4.5 | 1,190 | 5.7 | 6 |
8 | Fujitsu | 814 | 3.3 | 957 | 4.6 | 7 |
9 | SNI | 483 | 2 | 488 | 2.3 | 9 |
10 | HDS | 463 | 1.9 | 147 | 0.7 | 18 |
Other supplier revenue | 7,625 | 30.8 | 7,841 | 37.2 | ||
Total supplier revenue | 24,713 | 100 | 21,029 | 100 | ||
Channel markup | 952 | 654 | ||||
Total market revenue | 25,665 | 21,683 | ||||
Source: IDC |
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