Storage Special: Business Continuity Management

DR & BCM growth lures storage vendors in India

Though the demand for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity management (BCM) solutions is negligible now, in the next two years India could turn out to be the growth hub for both these technologies in the APAC region, says Shipra Arora

NAS is growing faster than SAN within the DR/BCM space, as is the case in the overall storage market, says Anal K Jain

In its APEC report of May 2002, IDC estimates that future growth in disaster recovery (DR) services will be faster in developing markets like China, India and the Philippines. It further adds that during the next five years India will emerge as the second fastest growing market, with a CAGR of 36 percent, next only to China’s estimated CAGR of 46 percent. The growth in secondary storage demand is expected to be in sync with this trend.

With projections of this magnitude, DR and BCM solutions will turn out to be one of the main contributors to the 63 percent CAGR that IDC is projecting in the Indian storage market from 2002 to 2007. Shailesh Agarwal, IBM India’s country manager for storage solutions, says that the biggest benefactor of this will be the storage sector. Giving an indication of the global scenario, the 2003 InfoWorld Storage Survey stated that almost nine out of ten respondents already have a disaster recovery plan or will have one in place within the year. India, experts point out, is almost two years behind this global trend.

The verticals that will propel demand are banking, finance and telecom. As these segments require data to be available on a 24x7 basis, they will emerge as the main customers for secondary storage in India. According to Sanjay Dhawan, executive director of Information Risk Management at KPMG India, growth of business continuity management (BCM) in the Indian services sector is the highest in the APAC region.

Considering the growth potential, most storage vendors have already chalked out strategies for future growth. Though they refused to give any numbers, companies like HP, IBM and Network Appliances have conceded that the DR and BCM proportion of their overall storage business is continuously growing.

Relationship between DR/BCM and storage demand

At the centrepiece of any DR and BCM plan lies the need to protect and fortify data in the event of a disaster. This is because data today lies at the heart of any 24x7x365 operation, which is what BCM is all about. Says P K Gupta, director for Strategic Development for Intercontinental Operations at Legato Systems India, "The role of a storage system becomes more crucial in an organisation when there is a need to protect information. Starting from simple backups to faster restores, to high availability of data and application—storage systems have become a key component in any DR/BCM planning."

The extra demand for storage is generated on account of replication of data from the primary site to a remote location. How this works, is that a copy of production data is constantly maintained at the secondary site, and in an event of disaster, business operations are transferred to the secondary site. According to Agarwal, the first phase of replication is that of data, after which comes replication of processing power and the network.

In addition to the demand generated for more raw storage capacity, DR/BCM are also driving the market for storage-based disaster recovery software, as well as storage management software and storage services. "Non-storage-based DR implementations involve basic server-based file transfers to remote locations, which is not really a foolproof way of implementing business-critical DR or business continuity," says T Srinivasan, country manager, EMC, on the growth driver for storage-based DR solutions.

Technology trends

• Networked Storage

The trend is increasingly towards networked storage, i.e. NAS and SAN. The increased importance of DR/BCM has led companies to distribute storage capacity across geographical locations, requiring networked storage capabilities. Says Anal K Jain, president for sales in India and SAARC at Network Appliances, "When going for BCM, one of the most important things is consolidation of data. It is impractical to draw a BCM plan on direct attached storage." Arun Rao, national manager, Storage Business, Computer Associates, says that one of the key measures that organisations should adopt in the DR plan is remote mirrored facility that is synchronised to ‘live’ production data.

While most vendors seem to agree on the growing popularity of networked solutions, the difference of opinion lies in the relative feasibility of NAS and SAN solutions for DR/BCM set-ups. Avijit Basu, marketing manager (NSSO), Business Customer Sales Organisation, HP India, recommends SAN as a suitable solution when going for enterprise-wide storage needs like BCM. Seconding this view, IBM’s Aggarwal points out that SAN has the advantage of going longer distances and effectively addresses storage management, consolidation and performance issues.

Jain however differs when he says that NAS is growing faster than SAN within the DR/BCM space, as is the case in the overall storage market. According to Legato’s Gupta, each organisation has to assess its business requirements and accordingly decide its position in the value chain of recovery capability. This will decide the storage technologies required in place to support that level of recovery time and availability.

• Server level vs storage level replication

According to Arun Rao, one of the key measures that organisations should adopt in the DR plan is a remote mirrored facility that is synchronised to ‘live’ production data

Another debate that is going to intensify in the coming year as the DR/BCM segment matures, is whether to opt for ‘server-to-server replication’ or ‘storage-to-storage replication’. While in the former, data is replicated from servers in the data centre to servers at the remote location, the latter allows the storage system to directly talk to the other storage system in the remote DR site without going through the server. Agarwal feels that storage level replication is more economical. Jain says that in the case of server-to-server replication the drawback is that one has to restrict the number of servers that can be replicated to another set of servers. In the case of storage-to-storage replication, storage is centralised, consolidating all storage independently of the server. This makes data accessible to everyone at the server. Dhawan of KPMG however feels that server-to-server replication has its own advantage as it saves investments on additional boxes.

• Virtualisation

Another technology that will gain momentum with DR/BCM is storage virtualisation. This enables bulk storage users to view multiple storage devices as a single entity, as it gives a box-independent virtual view of storage. With storage spread across remote locations in different boxes in DR/BCM, virtualisation makes this dispersed and heterogeneous storage look like one virtual storage box—making things easier and more manageable.

• Asynchronous replication

Another upcoming trend is that of asynchronous replication, which dramatically reduces bandwidth requirements. Instead of replicating the entire track, the technology enables the replication of data at the sector level. As a result, if there is a change only in a particular sector only that will be replicated to the remote site instead of the whole track. Copying at the smallest possible unit, explains Jain, helps not only in reduced bandwidth requirements but also improves manageability.

In addition, other technology innovations, which will come into prominence as the Indian market for DR and BCM solutions matures, are the ability to create and utilise multiple real-time copies of production data; the ability to migrate data between different hosts OSes; automatic fail-over and load balancing capabilities.

Business trends

Both DR and BCM are going to drive the market for large high-end projects in the storage segment. Increasingly, high-end projects, especially in SAN, will be coming from BCM in the future. Says Basu, "The involvement is much more in BCM and the project implementation level is high. When you have to connect from one environment to another and across the country, it has to be project-driven. This growing trend will put an emphasis on service skills and not just on box-selling. In such a scenario, it is the storage companies who will evolve an end-to-end robust storage solution. The quest for end-to-end capabilities will further drive greater solutions interoperatability and technology tie-ups," predicts Basu.

While generally there is a time lag of around 1-2 years between setting up of a primary data centre and a secondary remote site, the coming year is going to see customers who are planning to go for their secondary set-up along with the setting up the primary site, which will further boost demand for storage.