Enterprise back-up and tape

Merrier times ahead

With IDC forecasting the Indian storage market to touch $250 million by 2006, vendors across the country are coming up with newer and improved enterprise back-up solutions, says Atanu Kumar Das

Enterprise back-up solutions (EBS) is one of the fastest-growing markets in the IT environment. According to IDC, the Indian storage (hardware) industry was pegged at $119.6 million by end-2003, a growth of 16 percent over its size of $103.1 million in 2002. In terms of storage volumes, the market stood at 3762.2 terabytes at end-2003, a growth of about 65 percent over the 2239.4 terabytes of the previous year.

IDC predicts that the overall storage market will grow to $250 million by 2006, which implies a CAGR of 76 percent. According to this research agency, NAS products will account for 32 percent and SAN 49 percent of the marketshare in the total storage pie. Many vendors are of the opinion that this growth will continue in future, since India is still a nascent market as far as storage is concerned. The recent trend of the SME segment opting for storage solutions represents a huge market for storage vendors.

The faster the better

The new trends that are coming in the enterprise market are definitely in the area of enterprise back-up solutions, the major component being storage services. From the concept of taking back-up in the offline environment, companies such as HP have moved towards taking online back-up, which is fast and happens during the busy hours. The concepts of online back-up, LAN-free back-up, SAN back-up, and zero downtime back-up are to reduce the back-up window and ensure fast restoration.

According to Avijit Basu, country manager, network storage solutions, customer solutions group, Hewlett Packard India, 'We are now witnessing more specialised back-up software, so it is very important that the back-up services and back-up software are robust enough to take into account the requirements that are coming up in the high-availability scenario.'

He also adds that in hardware, HP has to look into tape automation, which basically means that the high-end library should have native fibre connect, manage mixed media, etc. The tape library should be as intelligent as the disk array today. In the disk array there is the controller, which is intelligent; a similar concept is also coming in on the back-up front. There is a controller in place which is intelligent enough to understand the kind of availability and robustness in a back-up.

The other new trends are in the drive itself, which has to incorporate more capacity in one single media; also, the performance has to be doubled with every model change. That's the reason why Linear Tape Open (LTO) generation 3 drives were launched, and why in Super DLT the next version is coming up. Those incorporate the basic speed of the drives, as well as the capacity and reliability that are essential today.

According to market analysts, the roadmap of LTO is pretty fast. Basu points out that within just 2-3 years, 'We are already in the generation three version.' The other technology is Super DLT. These newer versions are coming up pretty fast from the point of view of more speed, more reliability and more capacity.

Disk is growing, slowly but surely Jim Simon, director of marketing, Quantum Asia-Pacific, feels the foremost trend that is emerging in the enterprise back-up market is the adoption of disk-based back-up systems. 'The shift in using disk-based back-up systems is primarily due to shrinking back-up windows, the need for faster restore speeds, and back-up reliability, among others.' Addressing the concerns of IT managers about back-up and restore operations, Quantum introduced a series of disk-based back-up systems known as the Quantum DX series.

An independent study conducted among Quantum DX customers by the Taneja Group, a storage market research firm, revealed that users derived significant benefits by using the Quantum's disk-based back-up systems. According to the study, Quantum DX series users averaged an increase of over 200 percent in their back-up speed versus their previous tape-only data protection environments. The users also averaged an increase of over 400 percent in their restore speed over their previous tape-only data protection environments. Further, DX users all indicated a significant increase in restore reliability, with the majority of users indicating a 100 percent restore success rate.

All DX users indicated that back-up executions were now completed within their established windows 100 percent of the time for both incremental and full back-ups. A majority indicated a reduction in the duration of back-ups, ranging from 30-80 percent of their previously established timeframe using tape-based back-up targets. All end-users indicated that their DX solution either prevented the creation of or removed storage bottlenecks in their back-up and recovery infrastructure.

Among the other trends noted by the research group as far as the disk-based back-up systems market is concerned, is that the most likely area for disk-based expansion projects over the coming 24 months will be high-priority mission-critical application coverage. Specifically, organisations will seek to move all database coverage to disk-based data protection, as well as strategic business operations platforms such as ERP/CRM and e-mail. Once the application coverage platform is established, it is expected to see an increase in the desired retention periods on disk. Over time, there will be a comparatively long duration of archival data made available online via disk-based solutions.

Can't afford downtime

According to Pushpendra Kumar Gupta, director, strategic development, APJK, EMC Software, 'Newer technologies are emerging in the area of multi-tier back-ups and continuous back-ups; this is better known as continuous data protection (CDP), a system where one can keep track of every single change.' He explains that CDP is like a continually rolling database of every single change made to the system it monitors, keeping a time-stamped record of all I/O; with this technology, recovery is almost instantaneous.

Another trend that we may witness in the enterprise back-up market is in the area of back-up consolidation where convergence of back-up and replication technologies is happening. Back-up appliances have also started emerging as plug-and-play back-up devices for a few TB of data. Enterprise back-up/restore will play a very important role in information lifecycle management, managing data from birth to death.

More data means greater challenges

Enterprise data storage needs are doubling every 12-18 months. Simultaneously, IT budgets are decreasing, squeezing storage budgets as well. With their decrease, customers want to make the best use of the storage capacities they have.

It is estimated that most organisations are currently using only 35 percent of their existing storage capacity because a lot of information is located in islands that are not networked together. Enterprises are now looking at how to get more out of their existing storage solutions, and are minutely examining services offered by storage companies before going in for them.

The increased implementation of applications such as ERP, CRM and data warehousing software across enterprises has also contributed to the growing storage market in India. These applications involve tremendous data analysis and distribution, all of which require storage.

Growth in 2003 came from the banking and financial services, insurance, telecom, manufacturing, high-performance computing and government sectors. 'This year IBM will help channel partners explore newer customer segments which have so far not been ventured into by traditional channels. These newer areas offer immense potential for partners to broaden their set of customers. Some of these segments which IBM has identified are weather forecasting, online medical research, human genome sequencing, business intelligence, security, petroleum exploration, crash testing, digital media and next-generation film-making,' says Shailesh Agarwal, country manager, storage solutions, IBM India.

Where is the market heading?

In India, storage solutions are now being used mostly by the banking, financial and telecom sectors. The BPO segment has also started adopting storage practices. Vendors are hoping that they will see a significant increase in the use of storage solutions due to e-governance initiatives. SMEs also represent one of the fastest-growing segments for storage products and solutions. With back-up and restore products being an essential ingredient of any enterprise storage strategy, the demand for these products will correspond with the adoption of storage systems by the above-mentioned sectors.