Secondary Storage

Secondary storage: speed and security

Virtual Tape Libraries, tape encryption and higher performing disks are some of the innovations that are keeping this market ticking. By Abhinav Singh

With new regulations in the offing, Indian enterprises are legally required to use formal data protection and are becoming increasingly concerned about archiving and protecting their data. Keeping this in mind the archival value of tape drives has become more important and also encryption of tapes for better data protection is set to become popular. Longer shelf life and tape automation for faster backup and retrieval will keep the tape market going. Harmeet Malhotra, senior product manager, Australia-New Zealand, South Asia and Korea, Dell Inc, says, “Tape automation will take over from standalone tape drives as customers with more than 100 employees are buying tape drives in hordes. When the numbers are more, tape automation helps in faster tape management and backup and also gives future investment protection.”

Growing compliance requirements and adherence to SLAs in case of downtime have ensured that simple tape backups don’t cut the mustard any more. Which is why organisations are looking at implementing sophisticated technology such as snapshots, virtual tape and disk based backup. As per IDC India the market for tape automation in India was $61 million in 2006 which is expected to grow by 10 percent to touch $67.45 million in 2007. Similarly tape drives accounted for $59.14 million in 2006 and are expected to touch $60.82 million in 2007. IDC believes that the Indian tape market is growing at 5.6 percent (CAGR 2005-2010), which is the highest in the Asia-Pacific. The second position is held by China with a 5.1 percent CAGR and the Philippines come third with 1.5 percent.

Not fade away

PK Gupta, director- Product Management, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC Software says, “Tape capacity touched one terabyte per tape in 2006. At the same time, ATA disk costs have gone down to match the price performance of tape, giving rise to disk based backup. There has been an increase in remote data replication and consolidated backups at a centralised location. Tapes still remain important for off site storage, so the trend is of faster backup and retrieval to disk and from there to tape.”

Krishna Raj Sharma, business manager, Select Technologies, a division of WeP Peripherals Ltd says, “Companies are increasingly going in for tape automation and SMBs are going in for 10 to 16 slot libraries to suit their requirements. Archival solutions will still run on tape because of their longer shelf life and higher capacities.”

Atanu Chakraborty, director - Business Management, Apara Enterprise Solutions Ltd says, "With increased capacities tapes are becoming faster and LTO-4 which will be launched in 2007 will have almost double the speed and capacity of its predecessor."

When it comes to disks the big growth opportunity lies in the consumer electronics segment where the demand for media rich content is growing on account of high definition TV, mobile video and audio, gaming and personal media. Rajesh Khurana, country manager - India and SAARC, Seagate Technology, says, “The verticals that are driving growth in the secondary storage market are SMEs, government, mobile gaming and security. With the proliferation of online computer gaming portals, large amounts of storage are required at the backend. We expect the gaming market to be a significant contributor to the growth of the storage market. Another segment that will see growth will be security, where large volumes of surveillance video are recorded and archived.”

Mandatory security and compliance

Data security is one of the biggest IT challenges faced by organisations. Jim Simon, director marketing, APAC, Quantum says, “Almost all organisations in India back up their data regularly and maintain offsite copies for data retention and disaster recovery purposes. In spite of the fact that backup tapes contain confidential (and regulated) data, comparatively few companies have taken steps to ensure that backed up data is securely transported to an offsite location. In fact, while IT departments go to great lengths to secure their network perimeter against attacks, many organisations are lax in the way that they protect their backup infrastructure and tape media.” It has been seen that organisations are being forced to reevaluate how they can effectively secure their backup data. Many organisations are evaluating tape-based data security in India in line with the other markets.

Tape drive systems often include encryption capabilities. Encryption on the tape drive itself is easy to implement because it does not require changes to servers or applications. However it has been found that the most significant drawback of this is that it requires a major upgrade effort to convert old tape drives and libraries to encryption-enabled systems. Moreover, encryption that is bundled with tape drives or libraries does not integrate well in multiple vendor environments. It is easier to manage encryption keys locally in a homogeneous tape backup environment.

Manoj Suvarna, country manager, India, HP StorageWorks Division - TSG says, "Tape has emerged to be an effective DR mechanism which is helping in the storage of vital data at a DR location. Tape encryption is playing an ever important role in protecting vital customer data. We have HP Data Protector Software which automates high performance backup and recovery, from disk or tape, over unlimited distances. It encrypts data using AES 256-bit on tape and disk, enabling customers to comply with industry and governmental regulations."

Sivasankaran. L, director, Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India, says, “While it is important to ensure that tape encryption is in force, it is equally important to decrypt that data. We have a secure encryption based technology that not only encrypts the data but also helps decrypt it.”

In order to address security for stand-alone tape drives, tape cartridges and tape automation and disk-based backup systems, Quantum launched its security framework in 2006. The security framework is a comprehensive, multi-layered set of offerings for controlling access to stored data and encompasses three types of controls: those governing physical, administrative and data access. The framework includes DLTSage Tape Security in DLT-V4 and DLT-S4 drives with key management support in Quantum automation systems and native encryption at the tape drive and automation levels.

IBM has launched the IBM System Storage TS3400 Tape Library, which is designed to provide a small or a mid sized organisation with an affordable tape library that offers encryption technology to secure corporate data and protect customer privacy. This functionality is expected to help mid sized companies and enterprise branch offices address their rapidly expanding requirements for protecting sensitive information.

Simon says, “To implement effective data access controls, organisations need to classify their data into security classes that can be used for framing and applying policies, procedures, and management. The bottom line is that not all data is born equal, and different data types require different levels of protection. Data classification is necessary to prioritise data and apply controls.”

Disk based backup

Many vendors feel that disc based backup is set to become popular in the Indian market and EMC says that 40 percent of its customers have gone in for disk based backup systems, and that the company expects to see more growth in this category during 2007. Typically, BFSI, telecom and manufacturing companies are using this technology to avail of faster backups and restoration. With disk prices falling and SATA-based storage solutions coming to the forefront many customers are aiming to move to disk based backup.

Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, Network Appliance says, “Customers using disk-storage for backup and restore are those that have large amounts of data to be backed up, have critical production data that changes rapidly (hence the need to take continuous backups to ensure quick retrieval in case of loss of primary data) and those who have large amounts of data to be archived for long periods of time.” It is being estimated that in the Asia-Pacific region the approximate ratio of disk to tape capacity is 35:65, which is expected to change to 47:53 over the next two years. Sharad Srivastava, director- Sales (India and South Asia), Western Digital says, “Disk based backup systems offer faster data transfer rates, almost ten times faster than tape based backups. They also have larger cache memories. Also the mean time between failures is high.”

Disk-based backup is finding new applications in disaster recovery, imaging, document management, e-mail archiving, broadcasting, security surveillance and information warehousing. Indian companies have realised that the way to shorten the backup window lies in using disk-to-disk backup technology. Although tape continues to be a prime medium for long-term archival, backups are increasingly being taken onto disk. In disk-to-disk backup, the data is written to a disk-based box from where it is written to the tape. This intermediate step returns control to the server or storage array so that it can do productive things such as serving up files to employees who need them urgently. Some hard disk vendors feel that customers are frustrated at the limitations of tape and desire an approach that increases performance, offers much-needed simplicity, and maximises the value that they extract from their existing investments in data backup infrastructure.

Disk drives are available in speeds of 10,000 and 15,000 rpm, allowing enterprises to conduct ultra-fast backups. It takes two hours to backup one terabyte of data onto a tape, whereas the same amount of data can be backed up in less than half an hour using a disk-to-disk backup system.

Kiran Bhagwanani, vice-president, APAC, Sales, HCL Comnet, says, “Disk-based backup is set to become popular in India as data access (reading and writing) on tapes is sequential. If the data is located at the end of the tape, then accessing it will require positioning the tape to the end i.e. rewinding the tape. Even retrieving information via tape is slow, as the magnetic tape has to be rewound so that the desired information is placed directly under the read-head. Tape is prone to distortion, making it difficult to retrieve data.”

However the cost of disk can be a deterrent for organisations that plan to adopt disk based backup. Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-Storage, IBM India says, “Tape remains a relevant backup option as the cost of the cheapest disk drive will be much more than the cost of the most expensive tape drive. Earlier there used to be disk to tape backup but there is disk-to-disk backup now. However in case of a disaster where multiple backup copies are required, disk consumes more power. It is also easier to vault tape drives than disk drives.”

Virtual tape

A virtual tape library (VTL) is a disk-based data protection solution that offers a non disruptive alternative to tape. VTLs emulate popular tape libraries and appear as physical libraries to a backup application. Agarwal says, “VTLs integrate more easily with existing backup applications, processes, and procedures. They can also facilitate de-staging data from the VTL to physical tape to accommodate off-site tape vaulting for disaster recovery purposes or long-term archiving.” VTLs are becoming popular amongst Indian enterprises.

Sanjit Sinha, associate vice president, IDC India Limited says, “A VTL operates like a tape library. Nowadays organisations which are affected by the regulations need to store their data for a particular period of time and VTL makes storage and retrieval easier for such organisations.”

Chakraborty says, "VTL can go a long way in helping an organisation adhere to regulations as it is easy to segregate data depending on the requirement and also recover it. In a normal backup environment the data has to be recovered following the same path through which it was backed up, slowing down things. In a VTL environment, recovery from the end point is direct and it bypasses all the paths through which it was backed up. Direct recovery from the end point ensures faster recovery helping an organisation present the data whenever it is required by regulatory authorities."

Suvarna says, "Indian organisations are yet to fully define the requirement of VTLs as to where this technology can help them the most. However VTL can be a valuable asset for those companies which are experiencing high data growth as it allows them to scale upwards. Through VTL additional disk capacity can be added—dynamically, in many cases—to satisfy larger backup streams. IT administrators can define more virtual tape drives to set up more concurrent batch streams without having to purchase additional physical tape drives." Even SMBs can utilise the VTLs as small VTLs can be placed in remote offices to eliminate manual tape handling where there is limited IT expertise.

Personal storage and SMEs

Srivastava says, “Businesses have started using hard disk and flash memory drives as secondary backup in the form of external drives (portable/desktop). Flash drive capacities range from a few MB to 4 GB and hard disk based external drives offer higher capacities of 5 to 500 GB.”

SMEs use CD-RW, DVD-RW and hard disk based external drives. Srivastava adds, “In this segment, CD-RW and DVD-RW has been used through ATAPI interface based drives but hard disk based external drives support interface implementations such as Gigabit Ethernet, External SATA and USB 2.0.”

Where the growth is

Going into 2007 we expect to see more customers going in for backup adopting backup to disk technologies to improve their recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) whether it is VTL or DBO (disk based options). Agarwal of NetApp says, “Growth for secondary storage will continue to come from backup, disaster recovery and archival. Each requirement leads to a demand for disk-storage capacity, so the growth prospects of the secondary storage market look positive.” Disk based backup is offered in many flavours. Vendors offering the most compelling value in terms of simplifying secondary storage infrastructure and reducing the associated costs while leveraging a customer’s existing investments, will continue to gain market share. The demand for continuous data protection (CDP) is growing, organisations are realising that apart from the need to backup data on their networks as changes are made, they must also be able to recover that data quickly. Besides this the adoption of tape-based data security in Indian enterprises is consistent with the increase in adoption globally as Indian companies are valuing the integrity of their data as much as companies in other regions of the world.

Adoption of disks will be driven continuously, especially by SMBs. More digital information generated means more primary and therefore secondary storage. This will creates a huge opportunity for hard disk drive vendors. The BPO industry, surveillance, broadcasting and film industry will also drive the HDD market in India in 2007.