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Primary Storage
Primary storage’s on a roll
The networked storage market is gathering no moss, driven
as it is by consolidation and virtualisation of storage resources, DR, BC and
IP storage, compliance and regulations. By Abhinav Singh
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has been an exponential increase in the amounts of data being generated by Indian
organisations be they large or small. As per the Storage Networking Industry
Association, (SNIA) in the recent past India has witnessed massive digitisation
of data records (95 percent of data generated by enterprises is in digital form
these days) and that data is growing at the rate of 60 percent annually. The
implementation of new business applications across verticals for improving productivity
have further fuelled data generation. This has compelled them to go in for networked
storage as they want real-time data replication and back-up. As predicted by
Express Computer during its last anniversary issue in 2006, business continuity
planning, disaster recovery and storage virtualisation, have indeed responsible
for the growth in 2006 and they are expected to remain so in 2007.
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 "From
a business risk mitigation corporate governance perspective, enterprises
are looking at data retention and data discovery solutions"
- Soumitra Agarwal
Marketing Director,
Network Appliance India
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The proof of solid growth in networked storage (NAS and SAN)
is evident from IDC India statistics. The $115 million revenues totted up in
the first three quarters of 2006 are already higher than the $105 million reported
for all of 2005. The networked storage market is expected to grow at CAGR of
18 to 20 percent till 2010.
Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, Network Appliance India
says, “The explosion in unstructured data, e-mail (and attachments thereof),
and database sizes and the need to support multimedia content for internal and
external audiences is contributing to the growth of networked storage requirements
at Indian enterprises. Additionally there has been an increase in the digitisation
of paper content in areas like e-governance, document management, workflow automation
which is further fuelling the market.”
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The need for storage resources
has also been felt by organisations with an aim to have better DR and
BCP as by having a central repository of data it would be easier for them
to replicate and back it up
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Many Indian companies have also been affected by compliance-based
storage requirements and this has given rise to storage aimed at compliance.
A tiered storage architecture lets an organisation classify data according to
its criticality. Storage consolidation is on the rise and an effective DR and
BCP set-up are considered essential. Those large enterprises, which had already
gone in for networked storage and storage consolidation, are now going in for
advanced DR and BCP.
The market in 2006 saw the adoption of networked storage and storage consolidation
beyond the traditional BFSI and telecom segments. We saw this market burgeoning
because of spending by the retail and R&D segments for consolidating their
heterogeneous storage resources. Krishna Raj Sharma, business manager, Select
Technologies—a division of WeP Peripherals Ltd says, “Retail companies
are offering more services, have expanded their operations and are looking at
networked storage for greater efficiency.” There has been also a rise in
the content attached storage especially in the BPO segment as voice-based call
centres are storing voice records of both incoming and outgoing calls for long
term storage. All this has also given rise to sophisticated storage management
and back-up software which have become popular in the Indian primary storage
market.
Consolidation looms
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 "Instead
of classifying each and every bit of data an organisation should identify
the data that is vital and concentrate on classifying that data"
- Shailesh Agarwal
Country Manager-Storage
IBM India
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The need for storage consolidation is growing. Shailesh Agarwal,
country manager - Storage, IBM India says, “Organisations are moving towards
networked storage with an accumulated storage infrastructure. There is a need
to consolidate storage and simplify storage infrastructure.” The need for
storage resources has also been felt by organisations with an aim to have better
DR and BCP as by having a central repository of data it would be easier for
them to replicate and back it up. Broadly speaking storage is a part of the
centralisation of IT resources, which many enterprises in India have undertaken.
Small and medium businesses (SMBs) have also recognised the importance of consolidated
networked storage and are adopting IP-based storage solutions. Sudhakar Rao,
national channels director, Hitachi Data Systems India Ltd says, “Data
centres are going for consolidated DR solutions. We also see that consolidation
in archiving both mail data and flat files. All this is driving up demand for
high capacity storage.”
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 "When
different heterogeneous storage boxes are consolidated—
provisioning of storage and capacity planning is simplified"
- Anand Naik
Director - System Engineering Symantec India and SAARC
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There has been storage consolidation at different levels.
Kiran Bhagwanani, vice-president, APAC- Sales, HCL Comnet says, “There
has been consolidation of connectivity options in a single storage appliance,
be it fibre, iSCSI, FC or IP SAN. Security has been integrated into storage
systems as has authentication. There has been branch consolidation for file
level storage to optimise bandwidth and consolidate servers at branches.”
Storage consolidation is also helping organisations improve their storage capacity
planning. Anand Naik, director–System Engineering, Symantec India and SAARC,
says, “When different heterogeneous storage boxes are consolidated—provisioning
of storage and capacity planning is simplified. This is because when storage
is consolidated then more capacity can be provisioned for critical data and
less critical data can be moved to relatively inexpensive storage. Adherence
to compliance and regulations can be better defined and managed with storage
consolidation.”
DR and BCP rising
Disaster recovery and business continuity have assumed special importance for
organisations in India especially after the Tsunami in the Asian region, the
floods in Mumbai and earthquakes in India and Pakistan. They are being adopted
by the retail and the R&D sectors besides the traditional BFSI and telecom
segments. However it is equally important for organisations to fully define
their RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). Agarwal
from IBM points out, “RPO that is the amount of data loss that a company
can tolerate and RTO as to how much downtime it can endure are management decisions
and not technology ones. It also depends on the type of industry segment, which
wants to do DR. For instance a bank can tolerate some downtime as even if the
systems are down they will not loose any vital customer data but they cannot
tolerate any data loss.”
| Storage software as an effective management device
will continue to see growth in the networked storage market in India. The
enormous amount of additional complexity in today’s storage environments
with multiple storage devices all with their own proprietary tools needs
better management. The need to increasing efficiency and utilisation rates
of the existing environment is driving the market for storage software.
Naik says, “With storage environments becoming more complex and having
a mix of heterogeneous systems storage management software can go a long
way in managing heterogeneous, multi-vendor hardware set-ups and will help
in carving out the best price to performance ratio from existing set-ups.
It will also help in storage usability enhancements and storage provisioning.”
The need for managing effective backups at DR sites and also managing tape
drives from different vendors is also spurring storage backup software sales.
Storage software is also being widely used for data protection. |
Compliance issues affecting India Inc
The need for storing information for long periods and then retrieving it at
short notice while adhering to regulations gave an impetus to the storage market
around compliance and is affecting companies in India. This market is expected
to be huge in 2007. Many Indian companies with business dealings in the US have
been forced to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Basel II, Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act, EU Data Protection Act, HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11 (life sciences) and DoD 5015.2
(government). Though adherence to regulations is derived out of business needs
rather than government edicts, the situation is changing as regulations evolve.
Agarwal of NetApp explains, “While there are no strictly defined regulations
in India mandating long term data retention; enterprises are looking at data
retention and data discovery solutions from a business risk mitigation corporate
governance perspective. In addition, there are specific areas where record retention
is becoming important, for instance in government departments that have to retain
records for responding to RTI (Right to Information) requests or in the banking
sector, where RBI has defined guidelines for the storage and retrieval of official
correspondence.”
Enterprise Content Management has also become important for enterprises in India,
driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including structured, semi-structured,
and unstructured information It is estimated that of all enterprise information,
over 80 percent of it is unstructured, and a bulk of it is unmanaged. Regulations
are compelling organisations to store and manage data for specific periods of
time giving rise to content management challenges. The various data theft scandals
in the BPO industry have also made BPO organisations carefully analyse their
data storage and security strategies. Hence, given the content management challenges,
enterprises need to look at adopting well-defined and well-planned content management
strategies in association with experts in the field.
| The storage requirements of a Web-based business
differs from that of a conventional enterprise. For a portal or e-commerce
Web store, storage is an extension of its core business.
Although vendors have identified Storage Area Network
(SAN) as the best storage solution for online businesses, Internet portals
prefer Network Attached Storage (NAS). While some Internet companies have
gone in for a mix-and-match option.
Hungama, for instance, shifted from Direct Attached Storage
(DAS) to NAS. It deployed dual-switch redundant NAS boxes with 6 TB capacity
connected to the company’s Gigabit Ethernet network.
At Hungama, both Network File System (NFS for Unix) and
Common Internet File System (CIFS for Windows Server) file protocols are
used to access the NAS boxes.
The company has benefited in terms of better scalability
and flexibility for its file serving environment. The storage solutions
provide better modularity and freedom from proprietary hardware that is
typical of stand-alone appliances.
Further, Hungama is customising its set-up to create
an easy-to-use, highly available system. It comprises a true symmetric
Cluster File System (CFS) that enables scalable data sharing, high availability
services that increase system uptime and cluster and storage management
capabilities for managing servers and storage as one.
The market for online storage in India is a little over
$100 million and is growing at more than 20 percent through 2009.
Much depends upon the kind of applications that the users
have deployed. If you have a large database and run too many applications
on your system and require high performance, SAN is the best option. Files
that need to be shared with different people and departments like software
development, designing will require NAS.
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Tiered storage, towards ILM
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 "Tiered
storage can help an
organisation improve its storage efficiencies and utilisation"
- Atanu Chakraborty
Director-Business Management, Apara Enterprise Solutions Ltd
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Although the concept of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
had been there in the past in the form of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
but it aimed at classifying data as per its age but overlooked the criticality
attached to it. Atanu Chakraborty, director-Business Management, Apara Enterprise
Solutions Ltd says, “It has become important for organisations to go in
for a tiered storage architecture as they cannot keep on buying storage every
year and need to segregate their data and put the less critical data on inexpensive
storage devices while allocating the costly near line storage for more critical
data. Tiered storage can help an organisation to improve its storage efficiencies
and utilisation.”
Organisations in India are gradually adopting tiered storage
to classify corporate and Intellectual Property (IP) information. Depending
on the criticality of data, organisations are continuously fine-tuning their
strategies. Telecommunications, insurance, government institutes and banks are
the main verticals adopting a tiered storage architecture. Through ILM organisations
recognise the information lifecycle and it links the storage utility to applications
and enables the control and intelligent management of information. It also controls
the movement of data across storage technologies from high-performing discs
to mid-range disc systems to tape to optical storage thereby leading to better
utilisation of storage at a lower price point. It also helps in the intelligent
indexing, search and retrieval of relevant information to comply with business
policies and government regulations. Many enterprises adopted it and more are
expected to do so.
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Since managing data growth is the
biggest challenge for big customers, future growth will be in e-mail,
file systems, databases and content archival solutions and storage management
will play a vital role in managing them
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Initially there were hesitations about adopting a full fledged
ILM strategy but it is not that complex as Agarwal of IBM explains, “Instead
of classifying each and every bit of the data which is generated by an organisation,
it should try to see which is the data which is generated frequently and is
vital for it and concentrate on classifying that data. For instance if e-mail
is considered to be critical as most of an organisation’s transactions
takes place on that medium then it should concentrate on classifying e-mail
data. Similarly if an organisation has some critical R&D data they should
concentrate on classifying that data.”
By adopting a tiered storage approach organisations are able to set their storage
policies effectively. Manoj Suvarna, country manager-India, HP StorageWorks
Division – TSG, HP India says, “Using a tiered storage approach an
organisation is able to prioritise data and set up different systems in a storage
environment. Organisations are able to understand the different levels of storage
and how they support the business environment.”
Storage virtualisation
A lot of interest has been generated by storage virtualisation.
Sivasankaran L, director, Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India, says, “Storage
virtualisation takes the physical layer out of the picture and there is a virtual
layer of which the user doesn’t even come to know and keeps on working
irrespective of the virtual storage environment. Storage virtualisation was
kicked off by the large enterprises in India and now even some mid-sized organisations
are adopting it.”
Naik says, “Storage virtualisation has evolved from DAS, SAN and NAS to
fabric virtualisation. Enterprises are aiming to standardise on a single layer
of infrastructure software across their entire data centre that reducesIT complexity,
protects information and applications, improves manageability and control of
cross-platform storage and server assets, and drives down operational cost.”
It has also been observed that storage virtualisation allows
IT departments of organisations to easily deploy tiers of storage based on specific
application requirements for performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness. Virtualisation
facilitates unified data replication so that IT managers can easily migrate
or move data between different types of storage, including legacy systems. It
also helps to automate provisioning, expansion, and data protection tasks across
heterogeneous storage systems to boost an IT administrators’ overall efficiency.
SMBs embrace networked storage
SMBs in India are facing challenges quite similar to those faced by large enterprises
in terms of managing their storage infrastructure. SMBs want to consolidate
their storage infrastructure for better management by moving from DAS (Direct
Attached Storage) to a networked storage environment. Many vendors such as NetApp,
IBM and HP have introduced unified storage boxes having different storage functionalities
integrated into a single device. These boxes are expected to help SMBs move
to a consolidated storage environment at a far lower price point than enterprise
class storage. Vendors feel that although SMBs want to move to a networked storage
environment they may not have the resources and budgets for that. Backup and
recovery, archiving, e-mail management, and business protection can be major
challenges for mid-sized enterprises across sectors.
| A large Indian business conglomerate is using elements
of grid storage for the seismic data processing unit for oil & gas exploration.
They have deployed grid storage to hold down costs, streamline backups and
restore or make storage administration easier. Then are handful of businesses--in
media houses and digital animation studios that are evaluation elements
of grid storage. But none of them went shopping for grid storage per se.
To them, grid storage is a useful technology for solving specific problems
but not a new product or technology in its own right.
When it comes to grid the most commonly talked and classical
example that strikes in mind is the electrical grid --a large, decentralised
network with massive interconnectivity and coordinated management.
In grid storage you can add capacity as you need, or
add a node to the grid and they self-configure and become part of an entire
pool of storage--thereby reducing the storage management costs. Virtualisation
simply manages physical storage pools as one virtual pool, which is just
one of the capabilities of grid storage.
Grid technology can provide many benefits in data
storage. In terms of availability, for example, if one or more nodes fail,
other nodes in the grid take over the task of delivering data to clients
and applications. As resources are virtualised, tens to thousands of storage
nodes act as a unified pool in a mesh like architecture. Each storage
node can also monitor the health of all other nodes. When one fails, any
or all of the other storage nodes can help in the reconstruction of lost
data. Scalability, too, is improved. Every storage node deployed contains
one or more terabytes of disk storage capacity, as well as CPU processing
power. This CPU processing power allows advanced data management algorithms
to be applied to the data maintained by that storage node.
On the other hand Virtualisation involves the consolidation
of all storage resources into a virtual storage pool so that when an application
requires storage, the storage manager can allocate capacity from the pool.
Since the resources allocated to an application can be increased or decreased
at will, there is no need to over-allocate storage. Many analysts when
they refer to storage virtualisation, they refer primarily to heterogeneous
network-based storage virtualisation products. Analyst points out that
with this approach, there are two inhibitors to improving storage efficiency.
It is limited support for functionality that can improve
storage efficiency. When looking at functionality, most products go no
further than providing simple pooling and copying functions.
The second inhibitor is that the complexity of
deploying network-based storage virtualisation reduces the likelihood
of it being used broadly by customers. That limitation, comes from constructing
a solution out of many extra layers of hardware and software, possibly
from different vendors, each with different management and error diagnostics.
This complexity makes network-based storage virtualisation
very brittle and susceptible to significant management and general administrative
overhead, as well as creating risks to data availability and data integrity.
Storage virtualisation allows more flexibility
in provisioning storage as needed among multiple applications, providing
an incremental improvement over provisioning storage based on estimates
of each application's requirements. However this benefit pales in comparison
to the improvement in storage utilisation as a result of tiered storage
— utilising virtualisation and replication to select the most appropriate
storage for each application and stage in the data lifecycle.
Elements of grid in action
There are obvious benefits for which vendors and
analysts vouch for which is pushing grid storage. A storage grid is, in
fact, a meshed network in which no single centralised switch or hub controls
routing. Grids offer almost unlimited scalability in size and performance
because they aren't constrained by the need for ever-larger central switches.
Grid networks thus reduce component costs and produce a reliable and resilient
structure. As enterprise storage environments get increasingly complex,
organisations need the benefits that a storage grid delivers. For companies
that make widespread use of very large IT systems, the storage grid holds
the promise of making real-time scalability and near-infinite capacity
always available. The first goal of a storage grid is if a qualified user
needs additional capacity, it is made available with no appreciable management
overhead. Optimised capacity also means that whenever storage capacity
is added, throughput keeps pace. Analysts also agree that storage grids
can reduce complexity of storage management, thereby simplifying administrative
tasks and reducing operation overhead. This topography also improves utilisation
management, by effectively increasing the utilisation level of each device
and reducing the overall infrastructure costs.
IT outsourcing will also be an avenue for grid storage
adoption and growth. As IT services outsourcers look for ways to reduce
their own capital and operational costs, grids may provide real cost relief
while providing the service supplier with a flexible infrastructure to
meet the demands of multiple clients or client workloads.
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IP based storage
IP based storage will gain momentum in 2007 because of its strengths of cost,
capacity, scalability and manageability especially in the SMB sector. Praveen
Sahai, head -Marketing and Corporate Affairs, EMC India and SAARC EMC says,
“IP SAN has emerged as a perfect solution for low-mid tier organisations
that are planning to move to networked storage or could help in consolidating
existing SANs at the high-end. It helps in total network storage consolidation
of storage resources at a lower cost and centralises the storage architecture.”
IP-based SANs are expected to continue their growth momentum in the market.
The introduction of IP to the storage networking industry is transforming it
from a closed and proprietary world to one which is open and based on industry
standards with a strong pace of technology innovation. As per research firms,
IP SAN is expected to garner more than 25 percent of the global storage market
by 2007. Express Computer expects that a large chunk of FC SANs will move to
IP SAN, and low-cost Fibre Channel to Internet Protocol would be available.
Low cost SANs are easy to deploy, hence widespread adoption of this technology
is expected in 2007 as well. IP-based storage has also attained increased prominence
at the enterprise level because it helps in total network storage consolidation
of storage resources at a lower cost and centralises the storage architecture.
It also helps in leveraging existing investments in FC SAN. Sumit Mukhija, business
development manager-Storage, Cisco India & SAARC says, “IP-based storage
technologies such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) will play a more
important role in the data centre.”
- The networked storage market (NAS+SAN)
as per the IDC for the first three quarters of CY 2006 is estimated
to be $115 million and this market is expected to grow at a CAGR of
18-20 percent till 2010.
- Companies are consolidating storage infrastructure.
- Storage virtualisation is resulting in
better utilisation.
- DR and BCP become more sophisticated.
- SMBs want to embrace network storage.
- Regulations are affecting the Indian storage
market.
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What to look for in 2007?
It is expected that the growth will continue in all spheres of the networked
storage market be it storage consolidation, virtualisation, tiered storage,
DR/BCP or compliance driven storage. The importance of storage management and
replication software will continue to be widespread in 2007 as well. As organisations
are consolidating their servers and storage in data centres, storage solutions
for data centre management will grow. Since managing data growth is the biggest
challenge for big customers, future growth will be in e-mail, file systems,
databases and content archival solutions and storage management software will
play a vital role.
P K Gupta, Chairman Emeritus, SNIA India, says, “Telecom is one of the
major verticals where demand for networked storage is expected to grow exponentially
due to the number of mobile users growing rapidly and the information storage
requirements of telcos have started to follow suit. There are huge numbers of
call records, SMS and billing data that needs to be stored—which will set
the pace of networked storage’s rowth.” It is also being believed
that the demand for networked storage from the BFSI segment will continue as
Internet banking is fuelling growth in this sector, which again is a major consumer
of storage products and solutions. Then there are a lot of e-governance projects
and initiatives launched or being launched by the government, which would require
records pertaining to every citizen to be stored. In media and entertainment,
audio and video is being digitised and this will call for the use of storage
in a big way. Healthcare has also emerged as one of the major vertical buyers
in the recent past.
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