Storage

DAS and tape rule the roost

Small businesses largely prefer DAS for primary storage and tape for back-up. That said, many have opted for NAS and a few even for SAN. Disc-to-disc back-up is also becoming popular as a complement to tape. Megha Banduni reports

Data is considered one of the most valuable assets in today’s business environment. The need for critical information is not just restricted to large organisations, but is equally important for smaller businesses. Until now, storage networking has fulfilled its potential only in the largest organisations through the use of Storage Area Networks (SANs) and advanced Network Attached Storage (NAS).

There is a variety of storage options available, the most common being direct-attached storage (DAS), NAS and SAN. While choosing the right storage solution it is important to focus on specific needs and long-term business goals. Some of the criteria to consider include:

• capacity. The amount and type of data (file-level or block-level) that needs to be stored and shared
• performance
• scalability
• availability and reliability
• how mission-critical your applications are
• back-up and recovery requirements
• IT staff and resources available
• budget concerns.

DAS in demand

According to the survey, the benefits of networked storage have only marginally reached small businesses. 45 out of 71 respondents are using DAS, followed by 25 using NAS and only 11 have opted for SAN.

Although the implementation of networked storage is growing faster than DAS, it is still a viable option by virtue of being simple to deploy and having a lower initial cost when compared to networked storage.

DAS is ideal for localised file sharing in environments with a single server or a few servers, especially in small businesses or departments and workgroups that do not need to share information over long distances or across an enterprise. From a financial perspective, the initial investment in DAS is cheaper. This is a great benefit for small companies faced with shrinking budgets; they can quickly add storage capacity without the planning, expense, and greater complexity involved in networked storage.

Says Rameshwar Naik, the EDP Manager of Breach Candy Hospital, “We prefer DAS for optimal use of resources like PC HDDs and because it is capable of storing large data volumes.” Naik however adds that though they are satisfied with the present set-up of storage systems, in future they might shift to new servers for which they would go in for a different set-up of storage too.

The other reason for not shifting from a DAS system is because many do not see these storage requirements increasing—or having recently invested in one they would not like to invest any further. For example, Sri Balaji Medical College and Hospital has deployed a DAS solution from HP. R Marutheeswaran, its System Administrator, believes that they would not be investing in any more storage systems since they have recently brought the systems they presently have.

"One of the reasons why DAS is still preferred is the perceived high cost of acquiring networked storage" - Sanjay Kharade Principal Consultant Cisco Systems India & Saarc

Adds Sanjay Kharade, Principal Consultant, Cisco Systems, India & SAARC: “One of the primary reasons for DAS still being a preferred medium for storage for small businesses is the perceived high cost of acquisition of networked storage, especially SAN.” Another factor is the lack of awareness among small businesses about the available networked storage solutions and the benefits they provide; there is also a lack of dedicated resources like a storage administrator due to cost and/or availability factors.

Raymond Goh, Regional Manager, System Engineering, Asia South of Symantec remarks, “In comparison to SAN and NAS, DAS does not require the setting up of a new infrastructure or upgrading of the existing infrastructure. Secondly, for small businesses, DAS remains an attractive option because of the simplicity of the connectivity and set-up. In addition, it does not require re-training of existing personnel to manage NAS and SAN environments.”

According to Ashok Pamidi, Director, SMB and Base Business, HP India Sales, “NAS and SAN require multiple servers and a heterogeneous network, which a small business generally lacks, hence DAS is the most convenient and affordable option for back-up.”

Next most-popular

NAS is the second-most popular option among small businesses when it comes to storage. It is an ideal choice for organisations looking for a simple and cost-effective way to gain speedy access to data for multiple clients at the file level. Implementers of NAS benefit from performance and productivity gains. Smaller companies find NAS to be a solution that is easy to install, deploy and manage, with or without IT staff at hand. Thanks to advances in disc drive technology, they also benefit from a lower cost of entry.

In recent years, NAS has developed more sophisticated functionality, leading to its growing adoption in small businesses. NAS systems provide enterprise data protection features such as replication and mirroring for business continuance. NAS also makes sense for businesses looking to consolidate their DAS resources for better utilisation. Since resources cannot be shared beyond a single server in DAS, systems may be using as little as half of their full capacity. With NAS, the utilisation rate is high since storage is shared across multiple servers.

Prana Studio, which is into animation, post-production and editing, is using a NAS storage solution from NETApp. Pramod Daval, the studio’s IT Manager, says that they prefer NAS because of its speed of storing data; they now plan to deploy SAN as it will provide much faster and good storage bandwidth. “However, skilled the manpower required for SAN is an area of concern, but training can solve this problem.”

Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital plans to deploy NAS for centralising its back-up procedure and saving time. At present it has an internal back-up system provided by Sun Microsystems. Similarly, Rishabh Builders have deployed NAS for better and easy replication of data. At present the company has invested Rs 2 lakh in storage, and plans to invest more next year.

Early days for SAN

"Small businesses are realising that archiving e-mail will become important since legal or regulatory risks affect organisations of all sizes" - Soumitra Agarwal Director, Marketing NetApp

A decrease in the cost and complexity of SANs, and its associated components and integrated tools for set-up and management will lead to rise in the adoption rate in the small enterprise segment. Newer technologies like iSCSI will also increase adoption rates of networked storage, believes Kharade.

At this level consolidation is not such an important requirement, feels Soumitra Agarwal, Director, Marketing, NetApp. “It is when the number of servers and the total size of the data grows that the need to consolidate storage resources becomes critical in order to achieve better data management and higher user productivity. This is when NAS/SAN solutions become important to small businesses.”

Many feel that there are a lot of myths associated with NAS and SAN systems. “Lots of small businesses think that NAS and SAN are very expensive, but this is not true any more. Businesses can look at small 1 TB NAS boxes for around one lakh rupees,” says P K Gupta, Chairman, Storage Networking India Association (SNIA).

Storage vendors are trying to give users a SAN bundle with the best features at a low cost. For instance, Cisco’s MDS 9000 series SAN switches provide integrated multi-protocol support on a single platform. Protocol support includes fibre channel, iSCSI and FCIP, allowing customers to match application requirements to the most cost- effective connectivity option.

Tape has solid support

Of the total base, 45 percent of the respondents have tape-based back-up with 35 percent also having invested in a disc-to-disc back-up system. For instance, KJMC Global Marketing India uses HP’s 40 GB tape drive because it is cost-effective and convenient.

Says Mahesh Shinde, Hinduja’s IT Manager, “We have a tape-based back-up system because it is very cost-effective and reliable. The hospital plans to invest close to a crore in storage next year.”

Gerald Rodriguez, Head, IT, Tilak Nagar Industrial says that tape drives are very convenient, cost-effective and reliable in the long run. He feels that in disc-to-disc back-up there is no assurance of reliability and security. The company has been using a 10 GB tape drive from HP, and plans to continue with the tape back-up.

"The use of consumer CD and DVD optical formats are impractical for data archival and back-up; they can be used only as a short-term solution" - Niraj Mandal Senior Sales Manager Major Accounts & OEMs India & Channel Sales Western Region & Sri Lanka Tandberg Data

“Tape drives ensure the scalability of storage and archival with the data explosion, especially tape back-up because of its technology growth, adaptability to changing requirements, cost-per-gigabyte leadership, standardisation, superior data reliability and ruggedness,” comments Niraj Mandal, Senior Sales Manager, Major Accounts and OEMs, India and Channel Sales, Western Region and Sri Lanka, Tandberg Data.

Additionally, there have been significant improvements in tape technology over the last several years in terms of capacity, performance, manageability and functionality. As far as the technology is concerned, in tape drives there are a variety of options to choose from, starting from single-cartridge tape drives and auto-loaders to multiple cartridges and tape libraries that can take large volume back-ups.

With security of data becoming an important area of concern for businesses, there are technologies such as WORM (Write Once Read Many) which are now available on tape; WORM tape ensures that the information on it cannot be modified.

Disc-to-disc catches on

Along with tape back-up, disc-based back-up is also gaining acceptance. According to Shailesh Agarwal, Country Manager, Storage, IBM India, tape and disc-to-disc back-up remains popular because of device and media management simplicity. The sheer ubiquity of these technologies tends to drive the cost down while increasing the reliability.

Although tape continues to be a prime medium for long-term archival, back-ups are increasingly being taken onto disc due to the need for an ever-shrinking back-up window as critical data applications need to be restored quickly and efficiently.

As Rajendra Dhavale, Consulting Director, CA India & SAARC puts it, “At the small business level, people are doing disc-to-disc back-ups because recovery time seems to be more important than cost, but they do want to have some archival with a vaulting function. In addition, the use of discs gives them a solution for their remote offices.”  

Take Lakshmi Vilas Bank, which uses the MOD (Magneto-Optical Disc back-up) from Wipro, where the data gets automatically saved into the server. The benefit of it is its good potential, feels Ravi Chandran, Officer IT In-charge. “In case of server or data failure, we have back-up from MOD which shows a 100 percent success rate.”

Girish Deshmukh, System Administrator, Pride Hotel, plans to store data on tape drives for its large capacity and reliability. Currently, the company stores data in CDs.

“Disc-to-disc back-ups are becoming very common as ATA technology has brought down disc costs. Also, discs permit faster back-up and recovery of data than tapes. Some customers use disc-to-disc for nearline back-ups and tape for offsite back-ups,” informs Gupta of SNIA.

Optical drives dipping

The survey points out that only seven percent of the respondents have optical drive for data back-up. According to Mandal, the use of consumer CD and DVD optical formats are extremely impractical for data archival and back-up; they can be used only as a short-term, inexpensive storage solution. Optical storage lacks the capacity to cater to the explosion of data produced by applications such as e-mail, databases, the Internet and e-commerce, and also by image-based applications that produce video and audio files.

Dhavale points out that the optical drives being used in small businesses for storage are inexpensive, ubiquitous, easy to use and easy to lose. For this reason, most of these solutions fail to address the need for easy scalability, posing costly challenges for customers with increasing amounts of critical data that must be backed up and archived. “For those in the small business space, the complexities that accompany the use of optical drives would add up to a cost hurdle by bringing a serious security problem as well. This could be one of the reasons for the non-acceptance of optical drives by many small businesses,” he adds.

Jim Simon, Director of Marketing, APAC, Quantum points out that, “Optical discs generally have a maximum capacity of just 18 GB (or even 4.7 GB). This means that if a person’s back-up is more than the capacity of the optical disc, then he needs to manually change the disc to complete the back-up. Alternatively, an expensive optical loader could be purchased.” With tape drives designed for small enterprises such as the DLT-V4, an end-user can get 320 GB of capacity on a single piece of media—all at a cost much lower than optical together with a much faster (i.e. shorter) back-up, Simon says.

In addition, as Gupta states, “Optical drives are difficult to manage, and once scratched you can’t use them. They also get dusty quite easily. What’s more, the capacity of the optical drive is low, whereas tape can carry up to 1 TB of data.”

E-mail archiving

Storage for e-mail archival is gaining prominence. The survey shows that 39 percent of the respondents’ across verticals have an e-mail archival system installed in their organisation. The issue here is archiving unstructured data, which is a growing and complex challenge for businesses.

The KJMC group is using software from Spear Mail for e-mail archiving. Sandeep Shigavan, Assistant Manager, IT, KJMC group says that “E-mail archiving is very important as the flow of e-mail is high in our organisation.”

Typically, an employee sends and receives a large number of e-mail daily, and the size of e-mail messages and attachments is constantly increasing. As a result, IT administrators are challenged to efficiently keep pace with the tremendous data growth rates characteristic of most corporate exchange systems. Corporate mail stores are becoming overloaded with messages and attachments, and IT department struggle with reduced Exchange server performance and availability.

“The reasons for e-mail archival gaining popularity among small enterprises are regulatory compulsions and for storing databases. E-mail archiving is important for trend analysis of past data through present data,” says Pamidi.

“E-mail archiving is also helpful in the case of contractual disputes with customers, suppliers, and the like. Small businesses are also realising that archiving e-mail would become important in future since legal or regulatory risks affect organisations of all sizes,” comments Soumitra Agarwal. However, every organisation would need to consider the right sequence of technical implementation. Typically, e-mail archival as a solution would come after implementation of storage consolidation, adds Agarwal.

Opportunity for vendors

The total IT spend on storage is quite low when compared to other investments, with just about 2 percent of the IT investment going into storage. Clearly, vendors need to educate the small segment on the need for a scalable system. HP already knows this. The company has a partner programme called HP Presales Partner Community, where they teach the team members/partners how to provide the best solution for small companies. According to Pamidi, last year HP witnessed a 61 percent growth in the storage business, and it has a marketshare of 60-70 percent in the small business segment.

As for Symantec, it sees good potential in the small business sector for packaged software. The company has brought in products specific to this segment such as NetBack-up 6.0 to keep pace with the rapid growth in the size of data volumes.

Upcoming trends

According to the survey, 33 percent of the respondents have already invested in storage, and 27 percent plan to invest next year. We feel that with vendors educating these organisations about the need for storage, and with prices coming down, storage technology will see growth.

Data in a small enterprise may be, well, relatively small, but it is nevertheless important to the business and hence there is a need to store, manage, protect and retrieve the data. Industry analysts believe that in the coming 2-3 years storage requirements will boom among small businesses with prices going down and increasing awareness.

On the flip side, increased network and multi-vendor configurations, and unprotected mobile laptops and desktops are some of the issues facing the small sector, along with the usual limited resources and even more limited IT budget. Small businesses must therefore try out a combination that fulfils back-up, disaster recovery and compliance requirements.