Tape and backup: taming a data explosion

E-mail archival, ILM and disk-based backup will be technologies to watch out for this year, says Venkatesh Ganesh

Telecom, insurance, government institutes and banking are adopting ILM P K Gupta Director Strategic Development - Asia Pacific, Japan and Korea EMC Software			India is the second largest market for tape drives and it accounts for approximately 18 percent of the APAC market Jim Simon Director, Marketing, Quantum Asia Pacific	As companies rethink their data protection strategies and start complying with regulations such as SOX, tape is taking on a key role in archiving data Philippe Cazaubon Director, APAC, Sales Overland Storage	Disk-based backup is gaining popularity in India and the prime differentiators are speed, performance and reliability Sharad Srivastava Country Manager Seagate India	SATA drives are designed to offer higher data transfer rates, simpler RAID integration and faster HDD installation than their parallel ATA predecessors Yogesh Kamat Country Manager- India Subcontinent maxtor

It was a year filled with acquisitions. In 2004, EMC set the pace by acquiring a host of companies such as Documentum and VMWare to strengthen its position further in the storage space in segments including backup, data recovery and replication. In October 2004, Quantum acquired Certance, a company owned by Seagate. With this acquisition, the company hopes to enhance its tape drive business portfolio. Similarly, Symantec bought Veritas for about 13.5 billion dollars signalling intent of marriage between security and storage.

Vendors who have traditionally specialised in the external storage space are earning higher margins from storage software largely on account of the commoditisation of external storage. Interestingly, the CAGR of the storage software solution's segment is expected to be about 16 percent until 2008, according to IDC. Backup and archival forms the biggest sub-segment within the storage software market.

Says Agendra Kumar, Country manager, Veritas, "Replication is already an integral activity at most organisations. Apart from replication, we also see that the need for specific backup software is bound to increase."

Agrees Phil Sargeant, Research Director, Servers and Storage, Gartner, "Storage software continues to grow substantially in the areas of backup, recovery and archiving e-mail in particular, and in the SAN space."

Sector-wise BFSI, Telecom, IteS, manufacturing and government are among the biggest spenders on storage infrastructure and solutions. Banks have led the pack for the last few years. For example, during the last year, there were five banks amongst the top ten IT spenders in India, according to Nasscom and IDC. Says Kumar, "As banks have to follow RBI regulations such as the Basel II and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, they have to ensure that data is stored properly for the required timeframe."

Veritas brought products to market for addressing the needs of SMBs. Netbackup 5.0 Server helps organisations to replicate data automatically to a safe site. It also launched the Backup Exec 10 suite in Jan 2005 that it claims to help SMBs consolidate their data and centralise their IT infrastructure. Believes Kumar of Veritas, "SMB customers can choose one module at a time and strengthen their infrastructure over time. It's not essential for them to buy the complete suite at a go." Veritas has managed to bag customers such as Mindtree Consulting, Aurobindo Pharma, Elgi Equipments, Geojit Securities, Zenta Technologies, Zensar Technologies and Hexaware.

Comments Ninad Karpe, MD, India and SAARC, Computer Associates, "SMB customers are increasingly buying backup software."

While the mid-size and SMB market is booming, vendors have to identify and offer storage options accordingly. Argues Ramanujam Komanduri, GM, Storage, Sun Microsystems, India, "Indian vendors will have to identify their target customers carefully in the SMB segment because there are small organisations with critical storage requirements and fairly large set-ups whose storage requirements are still not critical in nature."

Enterprises are largely using software for tasks ranging from backup to compliance. Says Sharad Sharma, General Manager India, VP, Product Operations, Veritas, "A lot of Indian companies, especially BPO companies, need to comply with regulations. This is driving the storage software market in India." A lot of companies are going for storage consolidation and this could see them adopting storage resource management (SRM) software.

Archival's importance

E-mail archival gained prominence in 2004. For instance, almost 80 percent of Internet usage goes towards the use of e-mail services. The total number of messages criss-crossing the globe grew from nine billion a day in 1999 to 56.4 billion at the end of 2003-with projections of 164.3 billion by 2007 (according to the Radicati Group). AIIM, a content management association, estimates that more than 40 percent of storage costs are due to e-mail storage. If you extend this to a situation where health records need to be maintained for ten years for regulatory compliance, the figure shoots up exponentially. According to different regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), every organisation needs to archive its e-mail. As Indian organisations are going global, the need to comply with different regulations, and in turn, the need for e-mail archiving is being felt. E-mail, document management and instant message archiving are mandatory for regulatory compliance, legal discovery and business continuity practices.

Current storage systems have to be intelligent enough to handle unstructured data, including e-mail. This is important as unstructured data can account for over 50 percent of enterprise data. For most customers, data is in a state of constant flux because files are continuously being created, modified, moved or deleted, making it difficult to manage within a typical enterprise. This creates challenges for organisations to comply with regulations such as HIPAA, FDA, SEC and those governing employee privacy. They all have rules for various industries governing what information must be stored and kept accessible. The healthcare and financial service industries are especially impacted by these regulations that, coupled with companies' fear of lawsuits, are pushing the demand for archiving. Research analysts believe that there is a $200-million market for e-mail archiving across the globe.

In India, the vendors are bullish about the emerging e-mail archival market. EMC looks at e-mail archiving as the next logical step. Its acquisition of Legato and Veritas of KVS were done with the rationale that backup ensures that data is protected and stored appropriately. Archiving goes a step further and simplifies the process of managing and finding data. This is critical in today's business environment where government regulations and increased public scrutiny require well-thought-out strategies for compliance.

Explains Steven Leonard, senior VP & GM, Asia Pacific/Japan, Veritas, "Our recent acquisition fits in with the current market scenario. It addresses issues related to compliance in the document or e-mail management space, and we see a huge demand for such solutions." The company's product, Enterprise Vault, offers an archiving platform for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and file server environments.

Looking at the demand, players such as NetApp, traditionally a dominant player in the NAS segment, have moved in. Says George Thomas, country manager, NetApp, "Our software allows companies to streamline and reduce the ongoing cost of information storage and simultaneously keep all data instantly accessible." Thomas says that manufacturing firms, BPO companies and software development companies in India are deploying e-mail archiving solutions.

EMC sees e-mail archival tools as another component towards creating an end-to-end portfolio. Its game plan globally (as well as in India) is to bundle everything from e-mail to content management in an end-to-end storage solution. The total storage solution is aimed at meeting compliance requirement, through e-mail archival.

Vendors are positioning e-mail archiving as an effective tool for lowering the TCO of storage. Veritas is pushing its solution as one that addresses the availability and performance of MS Exchange by archiving e-mail that is infrequently accessed. The archive can be kept on low-cost storage devices driving down the total cost of the Exchange system.

EMC will be offering an upgrade to its Legato EmailXtender archiving software by year end that will feature support for MS Exchange 2003. Says P K Gupta, Director, Strategic Development, Asia Pacific, Japan and Korea, EMC Software, "Typically, these are MS Outlook files that are difficult to back up as they are spread across desktops, notebooks and PDAs. Apart from the usual functions, the EmailXtender can map all e-mail against policies specified at the mail server, thereby freeing the mail server for mission-critical applications." Another important gain that Gupta sees is the process of archiving onto cheaper devices. EmailXtender backs up on an iSCSI disk.

Similarly, NetApp's LockVault can identify data in spreadsheets, presentations or home-grown file formats that might fall under the ambit of regulatory compliance. These solutions permit unstructured data backup by copying and storing only the unique blocks of data that have been written since the most recent incremental backup. The solutions manage information in such a way that any back-up image can be immediately verified, searched, indexed or recovered, and cannot be edited or deleted until a specified date.

E-mail archival and document management are the key trends that analysts say will be dominant in 2005. In addition, the share of storage software and related services is set to increase. Comments Tony C Leung, MD Asia Pacific/Japan Marketing, EMC Corporation, "In the near future, the percentage of revenues from storage software and services will move up to 50 percent from the present 25."

Storage vendors are also fine tuning their strategy to address compliance for structured, semi-structured and unstructured data based on a single architecture. The key issue here is archiving unstructured data, which is a growing and complex challenge for enterprises. Organisations have to try out a combination that fulfils backup, disaster recovery and compliance requirements.

ILM's realm

ILM as a strategy has been a buzzword with almost all the major storage vendors aggressively promoting this concept. ILM in simple terms is a strategy for data management throughout its lifecycle. When an organisation adopts an ILM strategy, it should also analyse the type of data and decide the medium for storing data according to the importance. Policies accordingly can be customised and designed to assign data automatically to different storage media over time.

All the vendors in India are bullish about ILM. Says David Thompson, XPSO Product Manager, HP, "Companies are adopting Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies gradually, to protect corporate and Intellectual Property (IP) information." A pertinent point that emerges is that it should not be looked as a solution that is deployed and can take care of itself in the future. Depending on the criticality of data, organisations should keep fine tuning their strategies.

Comments Gupta of EMC, "Telecommunications, insurance, government institutes and banks are the main verticals adopting ILM. The ROI for a company that adopts an ILM strategy is huge." Gupta claims that EMC has reduced storage management and acquisition costs for organisations by allocating different resources for different applications.

Having to adhere to regulations will also help popularise the concept of ILM. Says PP Subramanian of Hitachi, "Indian enterprises who have to comply to US regulations, and who are listed in the US, will go in for ILM in a big way. An enterprise in the telecom and the banking space needs to preserve data for an average time span of 8 to 10 years. All these organisations have started archiving their data, especially their e-mail."

ILM has begun taking root in India. According to Gupta of EMC, "ILM adoption is gaining ground in India. ITC in Kolkata, Tata Elxsi for their visual computing lab in Bangalore, Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad and Mumbai and Hutch across India are all practising different stages of ILM."

Disk-based backup

2004 saw Indian enterprises adopting disk-based backup. Although tape continues to be a prime medium for long-term archival, backups are increasingly being taken onto disk due to the need for an ever shrinking backup window as critical data applications cannot be subject to downtime for hours on end, while a backup is written to tape.

Says Sharad Srivastava, Country Manager, Seagate India, "Disk-based backup is gaining popularity in India and the prime differentiators are speed, performance and reliability." As data access using tape-based backup is much slower as compared to disk-based backup, many Indian enterprises are looking at adopting disk-based backup. Srivastava says that disk-based backup is becoming popular amongst SMBs and entertainment companies where rapid retrieval and zero data loss are important.

According to Sunny John, country manager, Quantum India, "It takes two hours to back up 1 terabyte of data onto a tape, whereas the same amount of data can be backed up in less than 30 minutes using a disk-to-disk backup." With technologies such as SATA (Serial Attached Technology Attachment), disk drives can give tapes tough competition.

SATA drives are designed to offer higher data transfer rates, simpler RAID integration and faster HDD installation as compared to parallel ATA predecessors. Nearly 70 percent of installations in India are still on PATA (Parallel Attached Advanced Technology Attachment) and their graduation to SATA drives will take time, but the adoption of disk-based backup is expected to be rapid.

The future of tape

While new technologies are emerging on the scene, tape continues to be the preferred medium for long-term archival. India continues to be a big market for tape vendors. Despite a fall in the share of the tape medium in the overall storage pie, Quantum has been eyeing the Indian market. Says Jim Simon, Director, Marketing, Quantum Asia Pacific, "India is the second largest market for tape drives and it accounts for approximately 18 percent of the APAC market. We see a huge potential in India." In 2004, Quantum announced the launch of the SDLT 600 tape drives in India. These offer double the capacity of the earlier version (SDLT 320) for a 20 percent hike in price. All SDLT 600 tape drives include the built-in intelligence of DLTSage, a suite of predictive diagnostic and management tools designed to ensure that data backups are completed successfully and both drives and media can be properly managed by IT administrators to prevent system outages. DLTSage ships with every DLT drive.

Current tape drives can also be managed remotely. Says Raghu Prasad, Business Development Manager, India and SAARC, Exabyte Corporation, "Our remote management feature allows an end-user to engage with our autoloaders or libraries dynamically via a Web browser without having to be physically in front of the unit."

The next generation of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology in the form of LTO3 made its appearance in 2004. Players like Quantum and Exabyte came out with LTO3 solutions. For this, Quantum acquired Certance (a division of Seagate). While LT02 will be around for a while, organisations having huge data volumes will find LT03 compelling. It doubles the capacity to 400 GB uncompressed, while the data transfer rate also doubles to 80 Mbps. Exabyte has made its intent clear by announcing its LTO 6-generation roadmap (three generations are currently available). Speed and capacity are expected to double with each generation. According to industry sources, LTO 2 drives continue to gain marketshare for these players, especially in the SMB segment.

Tapes continue to go strong as can be seen from the spate of product launches. In November, Exabyte announced the release of Magnum 1X7 LTO Autoloader, an automated backup and restore system followed by the Magnum Tape Drive (LTO-2), an external LTO-2 tape drive. Similarly, HP launched StorageWorks Ultrium 960 tape drives based on WORM (Write Once Read Many) technology.

According to Avijit Basu, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks Division, "The HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 tape drives can provide backup up to 800 GB on a single cartridge." Similarly, Quantum has enabled WORM into a disc drive with its M series range of tape drives. According to Philippe Cazaubon, Director, APAC, Sales, Overland Storage, "As companies rethink their data protection strategies and regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (USA), tape has taken on a key role in archiving data. This, coupled with the introduction of Write Once Read Many (WORM) tape that provides an extra layer of long-term protection, ensures that data can last in an unalterable form for years if not decades." WORM tape storage is gaining popularity for its ability to meet regulatory requirements such as HIPAA.