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Storage Special: Low Cost SANs
Affordable SANs gain ground in SME market
Do Storage Area Networks (SAN) make sense for
SMEs? While it is true that SANs have been limited to the enterprise
segment in India in the past, dropping prices of fibre channel switches
and disks, and easier deployment, have made low-cost SANs an attractive
option for SMEs, says Akhtar Pasha
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| Shailesh Agarwal says that SMEs want low-cost
plug-and-play SAN solutions that can be easily integrated with
their servers |
A storage area network simplifies storage
management and improves data flow by removing storage traffic from
the local area network. However, with an average implementation
cost topping Rs 40 lakh in the past SANs have historically been
beyond the reach of SMEs, who have largely relied upon Direct Attached
Storage (DAS) and network attached storage (NAS). Ease of management
and affordability are two key reasons why SMEs are investing in
low-cost SANs today.
Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-storage
at IBM India says, "SMEs want low-cost plug-and-play SAN solutions
that can be easily integrated with their servers" T Srinivasan,
country manager, EMC India adds, "A SAN is within the reach
of SMEs and affordable. If a SME has two or more servers with multiple
operating systems, low-cost integrated SAN boxes are an ideal solution."
IBM pioneered the concept of
low-cost SANs when it launched its SAN Made Simple (SMS) campaign
in April 2003, which centred on ‘SANwitch’, a SAN solution that
combined Big Blue’s FAStT storage with a fibre channel (FC) switch.
Barriers to SAN adoption
Mike Sparkes, product marketing
manager-APAC, Quantum Corporation says, "SMEs didn’t invest
in SANs in the past due to the high cost of FC switches and the
specialised skills required to configure and design SAN architecture."
The good news is that server and storage vendors have started offering
packaged ‘SAN-in-a-box’ solutions that bundle FC switches, high
capacity data storage and software to manage storage infrastructure
through a single console.
Trend and business drivers
The cost of Fibre Channel (FC)
HBAs (host bus adapters) and SAN switches drove SAN costs sky high
in the past. Lately, prices of FC switches and cost per megabyte
have declined and an entry-level SAN is available for around Rs
10 lakh. Low-cost SAN prices range from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 30 lakh.
Inside a low-cost SAN
A low-cost SAN is an integrated
package that includes a FC switch, high-performance software and
disk storage that can be hooked up to at least two servers. Anil
Valluri, director-systems engineering at Sun Microsystems says,
"With low-cost SAN boxes, SMEs can start with a lower investment
while setting up their SAN infrastructure and pay later as their
storage requirements increase."
Low-cost SAN boxes are ideally
suited for applications such as messaging, Web hosting, CAD/CAM,
GIS and sharing of data across operating systems.
Demand from smaller cities
Demand for low-cost SAN boxes
is growing in B and C class cities, in addition to the metros. Companies
in manufacturing hubs such as Pune, Coimbatore and Cochin have gone
in for storage consolidation and are now beginning to implement
low-cost SANs. SMEs in Jaipur, Hyderabad, Vijaywada and Mysore are
buying-low cost SANs.
Managed services
SMEs tend to have limited budgets,
leading resellers to conclude that the margins involved don’t justify
the efforts that they have to take for each sale. Many industry
veterans feel that this trend might open the door to offering managed
services because IT managers of smaller firms lack expertise in
FC technology. Channel partners or system integrators trained by
server vendors can manage SME SANs.
SMEs buying high-end SIAS servers
can be tapped
Four-way servers account for
20 percent ($25 million) of the Intel server market. Companies with
4-way or higher servers are more likely to go in for low-cost SANs.
Agarwal says, "Over the
years, as their requirement for storage and applications increased,
SMEs have bought Intel-based servers with DAS. Managing DAS is expensive
and time consuming." IBM grabbed the market opportunity to
sell low-cost SANs when it found that its resellers were selling
multiple Intel servers to the same customers. "Once an SME
consolidates storage, the next level is to go in for data protection
and business continuity. Low-cost SANs will help protect their investment
and are highly scalable," adds Agarwal.
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| Anil Valluri says that with low-cost SAN
boxes, SMEs can start with a lower investment while setting
up their SAN infrastructure and pay later as their storage requirements
increase |
Everybody’s got a low-cost SAN
to sell
IBM’s low-cost SAN boxes are
the FAStT200 and FAStT400. Its customers for these products include
Pidilite Industries, Essar Lottery Division, Sanmar Engineering,
ILPS and Kolkata Port Trust. Agarwal says, "On an average,
we are expecting to acquire 20 to 25 new customers per quarter and
our conversion ratio in the last three months has been one in every
four enquiries."
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
has joined the bandwagon along with Sun Microsystems, HP and EMC.
HDS has started focusing on the SME market recently with its Hitachi
Freedom Storage Thunder 9531V and Thunder 9532V storage systems.
V Vivekanand, business development manager, HDS says, "We are
in the process of setting up our channel in India. Within the SME
market, our target market will be the extended supply chain in manufacturing,
life sciences, small pharmaceuticals, IT services and call centres."
HDS expects $7.25 million in revenues to come from the SME segment
by the end of fiscal 2003-04.
Sun has 35 installations in
the SME segment to its credit, all acquired in the last six months,
for its StorEdge 3000 workgroup—a low-cost SAN box. The company’s
client list includes India Today, Gati Cargo Management Services,
Hathway, Siticable, MTR Foods, Madura Garments and West Coast Paper
Mills. Wipro, HCL, Tata Infotech, Tech Pacific, Ingram Micro and
CMC are some of Sun’s channel partners who are selling the StorEdge
3000.
HP is offering the entry-level
MSA1000 as its low-cost SAN solution, priced upwards of Rs 10 lakh.
HP’s strategy will be to target auto ancillaries, manufacturing
companies, small insurance firms and telcos. EMC is addressing SMEs
with its Clariion CX200 priced at $20,000.
New verticals within the SME segment
New verticals within SMEs,
such as small insurance companies and small public sector banks,
hold considerable business potential for low-cost SAN boxes as these
companies are just finishing their IT roll-outs.
FC or IP SAN?
Low-cost SANs are likely to
become more affordable over the next 12 to 18 months as standards
for storage-over-IP are ironed out. Unlike current SANs that run
on expensive fibre channel networks, IP storage transports data
over a company’s WAN, that can be used for remote mirroring of data
to a secondary disaster recovery site. Though IP SANs have numerous
benefits vis-à-vis FC SAN, SMEs are not bothered about the
concept as products are not available and low-cost FC SANs solve
their basic business problems.
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India Life Hewitt (ILH) is an
HR BPO outfit. One of its core focus areas is the processing
and administration of payroll and pension for its clients
who number 270, with over 300,000 employee records. The company
had been using several Intel-based servers with DAS. Biju
J R, IT manager-infrastructure at ILH says, “One of the
Intel-based servers ran Oracle on NT. When we developed a
new J2EE-complaint payroll application on Solaris, the database
was not shareable. Additionally, server upgrades entailed
using additional resources, downtime and data being unavailable
to our customers. Backup was cumbersome.”
In early 2001, the company decided
to consolidate its pension and payroll database using the
IBM FAStT200 SAN solution. Biju says, “We found IBM’s
solution to be competitively priced. Additionally, IBM’s
reseller partner, Frontier Business Systems, offered better
customer support.” The FAStT200 offers 140 GB of storage,
a dual controller, fully redundant, FC with 10-12 hard disk
capacity for future expansion. ILH currently uses six of these
hard drive slots, leaving 50 percent headroom for scaling
up at a later date. Biju says, “With consolidation, managing
the pension and payroll database from multiple operating systems
has become easy. It gives us the option to plan our disaster
recovery site. Additionally, backup can be taken from one
single point. We have been using FAStT200 for two years and
find it fully redundant.”
In the second phase, the company
is planning to consolidate its three remaining databases and
it plans to invest in the higher capacity FAStT500 SAN box.
Investment in FAStT200 was driven
by technology benefits:
- A SAN box can be partitioned
and configured to allow access from multiple server operating
systems.
- Investment protection and
zero downtime: since storage is separated from servers,
investment is protected from the cycle of regular server
upgrades.
- Single point of management
for databases, backup and recovery.
- Consolidation using FAStT200
will help ILH plan and execute its disaster recovery site.
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Low-cost SAN product guide
| Vendor |
Product |
Specifications
of a low-cost SAN |
Customers/target
market |
| IBM |
FAStT200 |
FAStT200 storage
server, 365 GB FC disks, 2 Intel-based HBAs and a built-in SAN
hub plus an IBM smooth start service package. |
Primark, ILH,
Sanmar Engineering, Kolkata Port Trust and Pidilite Industries |
| Sun |
StorEdge 3510 |
Supports up
to 8 FC ports, can be scaled up from 300 GB to 4 TB. Product
is bundled with software for allocating storage. |
Gati Cargo,
Hathway, Siticable, MTR Foods, Madura Garments and West Coast
Paper Mills |
| EMC |
Clariion CX200 |
Offers three
2 GB drives, can scale from 0.5 to 1.5 TB of data. |
Manufacturing,
logistics software development firms |
| Hitachi Data
Systems |
Thunder 9531V |
Single controller
with two FC |
Port scales
from 360 GB capacity to 1 TB Plans to target companies in life
sciences, IT services, call centres and manufacturing |
| HP |
MSA1000 |
It can scale
from a single port FC to 6 ports (optional) and comes with a
single controller. |
Extended manufacturing,
telcos, small insurance and public sector bank |
| Source:
Vendor websites |
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