Managed storage services finally take off

Lacking a compelling business model, the managed storage service provider (MSSP) segment has been a non-starter in India. That’s about to change as Movinture has bagged a few deals in this space and the likes of Sify are waiting in the wings, says Akhtar Pasha

The Indian storage market has gone from strength to strength in the recent past. IDC has forecasted a CAGR of 65 percent for this market segment. Some enterprises are doubling their storage capacity in less than a year. All this growth won’t happen without some teething troubles—some companies are finding it hard to manage their complex storage infrastructure and are now looking to outsource their data storage to a third party. That’s where a Managed Storage Service Provider (MSSP) comes into the picture.

In the past, this market segment failed to take off due to lack of a viable business model. Movinture Storage Network has changed that by offering Argus Managed Storage services and signing up four Indian customers. The Argus suite of on-demand data protection solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery is available in four options, addressing the needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises across verticals.

Movinture—first mover in MSS

Movinture is offering online, near-line and offline storage to enterprises. It also manages its client’s storage infrastructure. Storage resources are paid for on a cost per megabyte basis, billing is predetermined and on a monthly basis. Customers only pay for capacity used. In this manner they significantly raise storage utilisation and return on investment. As the customer doesn’t own the storage and only ‘rents’ it, the risk of technology obsolescence is nullified. Rana Dutta, regional director-Asia Operations, Movinture Storage Networks says, “We have different payment models and customers choose the one they want. They can pick our storage infrastructure or build one at our Storage Header (Movinture affiliated data centre) and we will manage it.”

The firm has bagged four customers in the past six months, CorpShield is one of them, and it plans to acquire another 50 customers by March 2005. Dutta adds “This would translate into business worth Rs 3.5 crore.” Movinture’s Argus Managed Storage services will help customers take proactive steps and build comprehensive, policy-based offsite storage infrastructure for business continuity and disaster recovery. “It will help them to take information out of their premises and store it at our Storage Headers, reducing real estate costs and locating their infrastructure in a complete managed disaster recovery centre,” explains Dutta.

Argus is available in four variants—Argus Remote Stor, Argus Replica Stor, Argus Stor Manage and Argus Vaulting service. These services can address the needs of SMEs and large enterprises across verticals. Movinture guarantees Service Level Agreements (SLAs) covering availability, capacity, back-up, restore and retention support (Movinture retains the tape for a certain number of days) for the complete suite.

Uttam Kumar Jaiswal, founder of CorpShield says, “With Movinture’s Argus suite we have replicated the same infrastructure that we have in the United States in India (at Movinture’s Indian data centres). It ensures that even if outages take place in the US, our services won’t be affected as applications fall back to storage at Movinture’s data centre in India. Movinture’s offering costs a fraction of what we pay in the US [for similar services]. The MSSP not only takes the staffing burden off our hands, but it goes beyond the capabilities of traditional tape-based back-up by eliminating the high error rate.” Movinture backs up data constantly, taking continuous incremental backups.

MSS has lots of potential

Avinash Jayaprabhu, president, Hosting Services, Sify says, “There were two factors that led to us holding back our plans to enter this market segment in the past. Firstly, there was no clear business model and secondly there were not enough customers asking for managed storage services.” Now the equation has changed. Jayaprabhu says that Sify’s large customers often have multiple applications running at its data centres. The storage requirements of these clients are ramping up rapidly. Jayaprabhu says, “There is a substantial amount of revenue to be earned from the MSSP space—we are expecting Rs 100 crore from eight to ten large customers within the next 18 months.” Currently, Sify is offering tape-based back-up for internal customers.

India Inc. gives MSS a chance

Arindam Bose, deputy general manager, LG Electronics India says, “We believe in outsourcing to a large extent and understand the benefits of doing it but one thing is holding us from outsourcing storage to an MSSP and that is security. We need to maintain confidentiality not only for our schemes and offerings from the competition but also with dealers regarding payment terms.” He adds, “If the fear factor is eliminated from the minds of enterprises and if the concept (MSSP) is marketed well, it will surely emerge as a big market in India this year.” As a concept outsourcing storage to an MSSP brings value to an enterprise by freeing it from the cost of investing in storage infrastructure, managing and maintaining it for business continuity and disaster recovery (DR).

Wipro Technologies is outsourcing its storage back-up requirement (primarily as a disaster recovery initiative) of 100-odd users to third-party managed storage service providers (MSSP) in the US and Europe.

Ramapriya H, consultant IT management group, Wipro Technologies says, “Unlike in Bangalore and Chennai where all storage back-up is taken care of [by internal teams], we do not have good internal IT support in the US and Europe. The advantage of outsourcing data to an MSSP is that it offers economies of scale in managing storage resources, data availability, security, and human resources for managing storage. Also, we don’t have to invest in setting up infrastructure. The other advantage is that storage is growing at a rapid pace and only an MSSP can match our scalability requirements when it comes to storage. Outsourcing to a third-party MSSP is cost-effective when compared to doing it in-house.” Wipro pays the MSSP as per the allocated storage on a per user per year basis.

As awareness grows, the MSS market will gather momentum. ISPs and other service providers that are already offering hosting services and infrastructure management will soon get on the MSS bandwagon.

Movinture’s managed storage service offerings
Suite of offerings	Solution	Benefits
Argus Remote Stor	Remote Stor is an on-demand service for remote back-up and recovery that offers customers a pay-as-you-use model. It is a fully managed, enterprise-class back-up solution for files, applications and databases with added security for offsite redundancy. It includes daily incremental back-up, weekly full back-ups, customer-initiated restores and long-term offsite vaulting.	Fully managed and monitored by Movinture's team. It is secure and scalable.
Argus Stor Manage	It involves proactive management and monitoring of storage, system availability, utilisation, performance, resources, and capacity. Stor Manage provides a single point of accountability as it proactively monitors, notifies, tracks, escalates, and manages system errors.	Reduces storage capital investments, provides single point of accountability, improve IT resources and provides customised storage reporting.
Argus Replica Stor	It is a remote disc mirroring and replication service from a primary site to a secondary location. Data from the primary site is sent on a real-time or near real-time basis to a secondary site offering customers business continuity and disaster recovery.	Movinture provides a broad range of infrastructure solutions, including Fibre Channel, ATM, T3/E3 and E1/E3.
Argus Vaulting Service	Typically, disaster recovery plans include daily offsite tape back-ups that are picked up from a customer site and transported to a secure facility-the process is called physical tape vaulting. With electronic tape vaulting, customers can reduce the time to recovery, streamline back-up and recovery processes and potentially reduce the duration of an outage as well as onsite workload.	It strengthens existing offsite disaster recovery plans without requiring additional IT resources. It also offers better tape handling.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com