Appliance servers witness exciting growth

Networking, storage and server vendors are all offering appliance servers dedicated to executing one function superbly. Storage appliances have done best in India, followed by security appliances, say Prashant L Rao and Akhtar Pasha

Customers want appliance servers because they find it easier to manage one box instead of three, says uday Birje

Security product sales in fiscal 2002-03 totted up Rs 165 crore, a 10 percent jump from the previous fiscal. Firewalls dominated, accounting for almost half the market (49 percent) followed by anti-virus with 40 percent and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) with 6 percent. Globally, IDS products account for 40 percent of the security solutions market in value terms with firewalls and anti-virus accounting for 30 percent each. As we have seen, it is a different tale in India with firewalls and anti-virus accounting for the bulk of security sales (almost 90 percent).

"The Indian market for IDS is still evolving. Most network implementations do include firewalls, however," says Uday Birje, country manager, India & SAARC Region, Enterasys Networks.

Mixed bag of buyers

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, country manager of Apara Enterprise Solutions says, "Appliance servers are a niche market in India driven by verticals such as VLSI design, oil & gas, healthcare, BFSI and media houses. Companies such as Rediff, Yahoo and Indiainfo are using appliances as mail storage servers."

This year, pundits have their sights set on BPO outfits and outsourcing firms such as Spectramind, and GE. Demand from the BPO crowd is expected to spur appliance server sales in the country.

Servers and storage

Server appliances are relevant in the Web-tier of a data centre or in the home gateway or network scenario. The fate of server appliances is directly linked to that of Internet data centres that bought them in large numbers during the dot-com boom.

Appliance servers scale horizontally. Companies can start with a single box such as NetApp’s FAS250 (Fibre Attached Storage—the box offers up to 1TB of raw capacity for Rs 15 lakh onwards). Customers can stack additional FAS250s as their data requirements grow.

Anil Valluri says that Sun’s customers aren’t as excited about Intel-based appliance blades as they are about low-cost SPARC options

Sun sells the Cobalt RaQ and Qube products. Sun’s server appliances are auto-configuring horizontal servers. These server appliances haven’t done as well as their storage counterparts. "The Cobalt RaQ [market] is transitioning into the Netra. The next step is blades—both Intel and SPARC," says Anil Valluri, director Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems India.

Home LANs are an area where Sun believes a product like the Cobalt Qube would be a natural fit. That market hasn’t taken off yet. "Reliance and Bharti could give a big boost to the home gateway/LAN market," opines Valluri.

IBM has the TotalStorage SAN Integration Server, a storage appliance server. This integrated box that comes with IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) box, switches and FastT storage.

Hard security

Firewalls, VPN concentrators and IDS comprise the security appliance market. Cisco’s firewall products have the capability to perform IDS or VPN duties. That said, the company aims these at the SOHO or SME segment. Cisco believes that a truly scalable enterprise level solution requires separate components for each of these tasks. Enterasys, a late entrant in the router market has a different approach. Enterasys’ XSR (X-Pedition Security Router) product range announced three months back combines a WAN router, a firewall and a VPN concentrator in a single box using a modular approach. If a company needs a WAN solution it can buy only that module and plug in the firewall or VPN module down the line. "Customers find it easier to manage one box instead of three," says Birje. A combo box also works out cheaper.

Cisco offers plug and play appliances that are managed using a Web-based tool called Device Manager. It also
offers VMS (VPN/Security Management Solution). The company offers both high-availability and load-balancing solutions. "95 percent of an enterprise’s requirements can be met by a single box," says Avinash Purvar, business development manager, Security Solutions at Cisco Systems India.

According to Surajit Sen, appliance servers are designed and optimised to do one job extremely well, the reliability of devices are very high and chances of failure are low

Beyond appliances

Appliances have significant advantages but in one area—server appliances—they are being superseded by two classes of products. Sun, for instance, finds that the Netra and the Sun Fire B100s blades are more popular than its Cobalt server appliances in India. Sun offers a wide variety of dedicated ‘appliance’ blades that perform specific functions such as firewall, SSL, caching. It is toying with the idea of messaging and directory blades though a question mark remains on those products. "Messaging or directory may be too large to fit onto a blade," says Valluri. Then there’s the N1 provisioning server blade. Sun’s Intel blades have been in the market for a quarter so far. SPARC blades are expected next month. So far buyers have been in education with the likes of CIEFL (Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages at Hyderabad, IISc Bangalore and IIT Kanpur going for Sun’s blades. "Our customers aren’t kicked about another Intel blade," says Valluri. "They are excited about a low-cost SPARC option."

Indian telcos are buying 1 or 2 CPU, 1U Netra rack servers in big numbers. Reliance has bought 400 Netras. These NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliant boxes are a little more complicated to deploy when compared to the Cobalt RaQ but once they are deployed a malfunctioning unit can be replaced very quickly. The settings of a Netra box are stored on the firmware and they can be captured in a database during installation.

In security and storage, appliances are still very much where the action is. Expect multi-function appliances to catch on over time—they’re simpler to manage and that’s what an appliance server is all about.