Storage consolidation comes of age

Storage consolidation has matured and Indian organizations are at different levels of implementation. Akhtar Pasha says that businesses have a wider choice today when it comes to consolidation and that they are aligning their business goals with storage and heading towards tiered storage.

Storage consolidation leads to companies having to support fewer storage devices and fewer instances of manual interventions being required. Over time, software functions promise hands-off, policy-based, automated storage. Consolidated storage systems reduce other indirect costs by taking up less space at facilities and improving data access and distribution; these issues have plagued server- and workstation-attached storage architectures for years. The long-term IT consolidation opportunity rests primarily with large companies, but it is expected to spike in the SMB market in coming years.

Consolidating storage makes good business sense. The logic is straightforward. IT systems have an increasingly direct impact on basic business indicators, such as top-line revenue and customer satisfaction, and they, in turn, depend upon reliable and flexible storage systems. For most enterprises, the business case for consolidating storage is compelling. A lot has been written in past about storage consolidation; it is not a new phenomenon—it was way back circa 2000. There are four business drivers that are leading businesses to consolidate their storage.

Improve top-line revenue

Launching new products or services today means deploying IT systems to support them. As a result, bringing IT systems online is critical in gaining new sources of revenue. Just as packaged software expedites system development, so does consolidated storage.

Manoj Suvarna, Country Head for HP StorageWorks Division, Hewlett-Packard India Sales Pvt Ltd said, “Customer requirements today are broad and flexible. One of our customers, MRF, informed us that their customers are asking for a particular kind of tires for their vehicles and that MRF needed to take its customer’s requirement into account while manufacturing. They are planning backwards now by looking at demand and then figuring out what kind of inventories and delivery and IT systems are required to support and cater to that demand. CIOs are wearing the business hat today.” Many banks are expanding into rural areas—where they need to create new accounts so that business transactions can be carried out. Hence they are planning out how IT systems can support a bank’s growth.

George Thomas, Country Manager-India & SAARC, Network Appliance Systems (India) added, “The market has matured, in terms of understanding the need for a consolidated storage infrastructure. Large businesses have outgrown their own storage systems.” Take the case of HDFC Life Insurance; the company had acquired about 11 lakh customers from 2003-2006. In year to date 2007 it has already beaten that number and the company’s data is growing at 30 percent. Since there are numerous players in the insurance market, it needs to innovate and wants to provide customer services from a single window. All these factors were responsible for HDFC Life Insurance consolidating its storage and planning for business continuity, Thomas added.

Srinivas Rao, Technical Director, Hitachi Data System said, “Storage consolidation is not a new trend; it started back in 2000-01. HDFC Bank, Infosys and i2 Technologies consolidated their storage and have been using a FC SAN since then.”

A better RoI

Line-of-business managers and storage managers develop service level agreements (SLAs) that provide cheaper storage for those applications that do not need megabit-per-second bandwidth, millisecond latencies, and 99.999% availability. The ability to adjust QoS, to up it for demanding applications and lower performance when less is enough, will be one of the biggest benefits of consolidation. Rao put it little differently saying, “The biggest challenge before large businesses is to maintain their service levels [while continuing to grow]. Businesses have prioritized their business critical applications in terms of IO performance, 100 percent uptime and high performance; storage is going the same way, which is why companies are looking at tiering their storage resources so that according to the business requirement, they can align their storage based on the performance that is required.”

Siva Sankaran L, Director, Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India said, “Though the budgets available to IT managers are not increasing, they have been asked to manage with what they have. This is where storage consolidation has caught on. They are mapping if their infrastructure towards meeting their business objectives.”

Reduce indirect and overall costs

The direct cost per megabyte of server-attached storage is less than the direct cost per megabyte of consolidated storage, but when indirect costs are factored in, consolidated storage is works out to be the less expensive proposition. The most important indirect cost savings are derived from increased management leverage— that is, the ability of fewer people to manage a great deal more of storage capacity. Suvarna said, “While IT budgets are not growing, data is quadrupling. IT managers want their business objectives to be in line with the storage—providing high availability, a point of recovery in case of a system failure and better management.

“Awareness amongst businesses about consolidating storage resources is low and there is a need to educate them. To this end HP is creating awareness in the market with its partners who tailor solutions to fit customer requirements. Our partner Future Biz demonstrates blades alongside storage and backup in a small 100 square foot data center.”

P K Gupta, Backup, Recovery and Archive Solutions Director - APJ EMC Global Services said, “Businesses want to control their growth and reduce their exposure to risk. In the case of banks, about 70% of the data is in remote locations. IT heads wants to consolidate their servers, storage and applications to gain better control of the infrastructure with a well-defined backup window.”

Automation, DR and BCP as business drivers

Suvarna said, “We have found that large businesses are adopting DR and BCP as they have understood what storage can do for them. If business is peaking [and maxed out] they need to plan their storage and what would be the [Recovery Time Objective].”

Pallab Talukdar, Director-Enterprise Business, Dell India Pvt Ltd said, “Storage consolidation has gained sufficient ground to managed storage infrastructure and reduce management costs. Additionally DR and BC are fueling this market.”

Interestingly a lot of DR projects were initiated based on storage consolidation. Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, Network Appliance Systems (India) said, “DR is [perhaps the most important] factor driving storage consolidation followed by high availability.” Agarwal talked about a media giant that has adopted an adaptive computing model, allowing it to scale its storage infrastructure instantly to accommodate changes in its business needs. NetApp provides this company with a backup, recovery, and business continuity solution that helps it be as agile as necessary while simplifying the management of its data.

Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, StorageIO—IT infrastructure technology analysts and consultants said, “In some cases yes, storage consolidation is similar to server consolidation using virtualization; these are seen as near term remedies to contain, control or reduce costs by boosting utilization of underutilized resources including servers, storage, networks, [while making more economical use of] software licenses, power, cooling and floor space.” Atanu Chakraborty, Director-Sales, Apara Enterprise Solutions (P) Ltd said, “In India, especially among ITeS and development houses, companies have different projects with varied storage workloads and there is growing complexity in managing the same, which is leading to them to consolidate storage. There is a quantum jump of 50% in a number of organizations going in for storage consolidation.”

A wider choice of technologies

Traditionally when large businesses (typically banks and carriers) consolidated their storage and deployed network-attached storage, they wanted a high performance storage solutions with high IO, availability and reliability, which made FC SAN a natural choice. Predominantly in OLTP environments, high-speed transactional processes demand FC SAN and a lot has been written about this and the topic has been beaten to death so we will not go on at length about the virtues of FC SAN. Rather we would like to focus on new areas.

Tiered storage

Growing volumes of inactive data are a concern for companies of all sizes. Many analysts have indicated that 80% of all stored data is inactive. Once created, data is rarely, if ever accessed after 30 to 90 days. The consequent, ever-increasing demand for storage capacity poses a real problem. Companies also recognize that not all of their data is of equal value. However, most organizations continue to store all of their data on a single tier of storage with the same protection level because they believe that implementing a tiered storage approach requires a significant investment of time and resources. Tiered storage matches the value of data with the performance (and cost) of storage. For example, valuable or frequently accessed data is kept on high-performance Fiber Channel (FC) disk, less valuable data is moved to less expensive nearline storage, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA arrays, and infrequently accessed data can be migrated to high-volume SATA disk or tape. Ideally, tiered storage can save money, while easing the access demands on any particular storage tier. Shailesh Agarwal, Country Manager- Storage, IBM India/South Asia said, “Because companies have a broad range of data that is used for different purposes, it makes sense to store it on different types of disk. This is the foundation of a tiered storage approach. A storage system that supports multiple disk types with the ability to mix high-performance Fiber Channel (FC) and high-capacity SATA drives within an array provides IT administrators with the flexibility to put the right data on the right type of disk, which can have a dramatic impact on costs.” Customers are tiering storage resources within the same storage box. Syndicate Bank is an example of this. He continued that a large business can have hundreds of disks with the same storage subsystems. Say 73 GB 15,000 RPM drives can be used for a transaction-oriented database application that requires the fastest performance, while 146 GB 15,000 RPM drives can be used for the ATM records and 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA drives can be used for disk backups all within the same storage subsystem.

Today businesses are facing the dilemma of data migration that requires downtime. So large businesses are looking at data mobility without disruption to their business operations. IBM had acquired a company called Softek Storage Solutions Corporation. Shailesh Agarwal said, “Softek Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) lets businesses conduct online data migration across the enterprise as part of any IT infrastructure change on any storage, platform or distance with zero application downtime or performance impact. The migration process can continue in the event of a server shutdown and restart.”

Talukdar said, “Today a large section of my customers are using a tiered storage architecture where FC and SATA disks are in the same storage box.” He cited MindTree as an example of this.

HP supports FC and SATA/iSCSI in the same box in its EVA/MSA series. Rao added, “Businesses are deploying both FC and iSCSI within the same box. We are also introducing a new product called WMS 100 that supports both these technologies within the next six months.”

Chakraborty added, “What is important is that businesses are cautiously taking a decision to tier their storage to match their business strategy to optimize and increase storage utilization and our customers such as Yahoo, Rediff or Google are all examples of that.”

iSCSI in the mainstream?

The answer to that question is that iSCSI is not quite there yet. That said, there is some momentum. Fiber Channel SAN solutions are the de facto standard for mission-critical applications in large corporate data centers. However, direct-attached storage is more likely to be the norm in regional and departmental data centers, and at remote offices. It’s these areas that the purveyors of IP Storage solutions are targeting today, usually because they are affordable, reliable, easy-to-use, and based on familiar technology.

Two protocols (FCIP and iFCP) are available to interconnect geographically distributed Fiber Channel SAN environments. FCIP is a TCP/IP-based tunneling protocol designed to transparently provide point-to-point connections between Fiber Channel SANs. It is most often used to provide connectivity to remote SANs for centralized backup/restore or remote data replication applications. iFCP enables the interconnection of storage devices and/or Fiber Channel SANs using an IP infrastructure. It is particularly well-suited to providing the reliable transport of storage data between SAN domains over LAN, MAN or WAN infrastructure. In contrast, the iSCSI protocol enables the creation of SAN solutions based on Gigabit Ethernet instead of Fiber Channel. iSCSI is simply the combination of two well-understood technologies: SCSI block storage commands and TCP/IP. iSCSI is particularly interesting as a SAN alternative to direct-attached storage in environments where simplicity, flexibility, and price/performance are critical factors. IP Storage as defined in the context of the SNIA is standard SCSI (block) storage, as opposed to NAS (file) storage—so by definition, it’s SAN.

Today, iSCSI storage solutions are being deployed primarily in environments dominated by mid-range and low-end servers. Chakraborty said, “There is some excitement in the market about iSCSI SAN deployments. Large businesses are consolidated their Exchange mail servers on to iSCSI and Sify and Tech Mahindra are some examples.” Talukdar says that IP SAN is providing opportunities for growth. iSCSI makes a lot of sense if businesses are creating a fresh setup. However, if they are already using FC, then iSCSI does not make sense. With 10Gb Ethernet, users will gain confidence in iSCSI. Earlier SCSI vendors were inconsistent and there was no standard protocol. Now standards have been created and are endorsed by SNIA.”

Soumitra Agarwal added, “We have sold iSCSI where it has been used for e-mail consolidation of Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.”

Rao said that iSCSI SANs has matured as a technology and is well suited for applications that do not require extremely high I/O performance. We have seen instances of it being used for file server consolidation.

According to Suvarna, IP SAN is there but it is in the early stages of deployment. When it comes to IP SAN, customers are ambivalent about the technology. Clearly FC SANs are going into OLTP environments where high availability and performance are required. IP SAN is also being used for archival. Schulz suggests that it would be worth keeping an eye on the FCoE vs. iSCSI situation for block access storage as well as iSCSI vs. NAS for IP-based storage going forward.

According to SNIA Europe’s IP Storage Initiative (IPSI) while iSCSI SAN revenue will not come anywhere near that of Fiber Channel SAN this year, 2007 will be marked by a number of interesting developments that will eventually lead to a dramatic change in the revenue split between these two technologies.

iSCSI performance: misunderstood

Likely prospects have concerns about iSCSI’s perceived performance issues and doubt if they will get the right kind of support if they end up using iSCSI SANs. Shailesh Agarwal says, “Though we are not big players in the iSCSI market, iSCSI SANs score in terms of the cost required to connect. It makes sense if a business is creating a separate infrastructure. The biggest factor holding this technology back is limited support on the OS front.” Soumitra Agarwal said, “10GbE Ethernet will influence iSCSI adoption.” Soumitra Agarwal talked about a joint study conducted by BLADE Network Technologies Inc., Chelsio Communication and NetApp to demonstrate and validate the throughput potential of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) for network storage. The study found that 10GbE is a viable alternative to Fiber Channel for mission-critical workloads. In fact it deliver more than twice the throughput of 4Gb FC. The study concludes that deploying 10GbE can simplify the data center fabric, reduce equipment footprint, lower power consumption and cooling requirement through consolidation and reduce the TCO of IT infrastructure. It also said that 10GbE is ready for mission-critical and storage-intensive applications.

SRM and storage consolidation

A sound consolidation strategy also includes software products that apply a layer of analysis and automation to the storage infrastructure. Storage resource management (SRM) tools are an important part of storage consolidation. Rao said that we are finding significant uptake for SRM and businesses want to address a wide range of storage problems such as simplifying storage management, virtualization, enabling partitioning within same storage subsystem and dynamic storage provisioning. Shailesh Agarwal added “In the last few years the infrastructure of large businesses was not so big that it required investing in SRM. Today SRM has become vendor-agnostic. It eases your storage management.”

Storage technology continues to evolve. The data center is, and will remain, a multi-vendor and multi-generational environment with a mix of technologies that must be made to work together and there are growing signs of this in India as well. Organizations are bracing themselves for the next generation of storage.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com