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Event
Service Oriented Storage
HDS believes that Service Oriented Storage is the way to
go and that mobility will play a key role in upcoming storage technologies.
By Kushal Shah
Globally, we are seeing a huge data surge which is turning every expert prediction
into an underestimate. This excessive data growth is a boon for all storage
vendors, regardless of whether they are selling hardware or software. In this
data deluge, the Asia Pacific region is seeing the highest growth and it is
gaining prominence with global players with every passing year. With all this
in mind, Hitachi Data Systems hosted the Asia Pacific Storage summit 2007 in
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The event revolved around HDS global and regional businesses along with some
of the diversification ideas of moving towards service oriented storage; all
of which was coupled with customer experiences of companies across the region
including that of HDFC Bank.
The outlook
The event took off with a presentation by Jack Domme, Chief
Operating Officer, Hitachi Data Systems on the company’s direction and
his vision for the future. According to Domme, HDS saw 10% sequential growth
in Q3 CY07 which was higher than that of the overall market which was mostly
driven by the APAC. He spoke about the growing trends in storage. “Better
allocation, utilization, protection, reduction of redundancy and virtualization
are rapidly picking up but unstructured data is becoming a big problem these
days,” said Domme. Another problem for businesses is flat IT budgets which
are growing at around 6.4% for the APAC region. Domme talked about the maturity
model of a new variant of storage usage called Service Oriented Storage, which
eventually became a topic of discussion throughout the event. According to Domme,
service oriented storage would enable organizations to simplify management,
increase asset utilization, enable multi-tier thin provisioning, lower operational
cost, and reduce complexity by making the right use of virtualization, data
mobility, policy based automation, content-aware automation on top of a heterogeneous
storage environment. He expressed concern about the growing amount of unstructured
data. “Customers are seeing a lot of growth in unstructured data which
is growing at ten times the rate of structured data and out of which, only four
percent of data goes through content filtering which is a big problem,”
explained Domme. Looking ahead, HDS is plans to continue driving unstructured
data market and would look to get a common integrated, eco-friendly platform
for all data storage related applications, be it for structured or unstructured
data.
Moving ahead, Michael Cremen, Senior Vice President &
General Manager - APAC, HDS talked about their success in the APAC and the challenges
that he saw within client organizations. According to Cremen, the APAC region
is enjoying unprecedented growth with India and Hong Kong growing by more than
50%. In terms of customer challenges, he said, “Doing more with less and
first mover advantage have become really important. With work going global,
there is someone somewhere working all the time and downtime has become an intolerable
issue.” In all this, he feels that virtualization is an enabling technology
and can be made the core of all solutions.
From L to R: Hubert Yoshida, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
HDS; Jack Domme, Chief Operating Officer, Hitachi Data Systems; Vivekanand
Venugopal, Solutions and Products Director, APAC, HDS; and Michael Cremen,
Senior Vice President & General Manager - APAC, HDS
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Michael Cremen, Senior Vice President & General Manager –APAC,
HDS (L) and Jack Domme, Chief Operating Officer, Hitachi Data Systems
(R) with Munish Mittal, Vice President-IT, HDFC Bank (Center) |
Virtualization 2.0 and Dynamic Data Centers
Storage trends and service oriented storage were discussed by Hubert Yoshida,
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, HDS. Talking about storage dynamics,
Yoshida said, “Storage growth rates are compounding and at the same time
technology is changing almost every year.” As per IDG and AG Edwards projections,
the amount of storage shipped has grown from few petabytes to about 3,000 petabytes
and it is poised to cross the 8,000 mark by 2010 which is making technology
refreshes more difficult to implement. According to him, the traditional storage
model doesn’t work any more and that the creation of islands of storage
doesn’t make sense. He pointed out that even after the utilization promises
of SAN; storage utilization is still hovering at about 20-30%. There is no networking
or data mobility between storage systems using SAN and therefore storage virtualization
1.0, which is SAN-based, is not able to solve many storage-related problems.
In order to solve these worries, Yoshida put forth the concept of Virtualization
2.0 as defined by IDC which can serve as an uniform storage platform. “Virtualization
2.0 can provide data mobility, business continuity, disaster recovery and non
disruptive technology refresh. In addition to this, it can add functionalities
to low-cost SATA disks,” said Yoshida. He stated that all information is
not created equal and needs are different at different times and that dynamic
provisioning can make real-time allotment possible. He touched upon the issue
of data de-duplication. The growth of unstructured data is leading to duplicate
data being stored and the duplication factor is as high as 25:1. According to
HDS, all these issues of mobility, dynamic provisioning, and data de-duplication
can be effectively managed with the help of Hitachi’s service-oriented
storage solutions architecture. According to Yoshida, the storage management
issue is so critical that 65% of data centers will need to be rebuilt within
the next five years and he puts forth the concept of transforming IT from stove
pipe like infrastructure to dynamic data centers.
Step by Step
Vivekanand Venugopal, Solutions and Products Director, APAC, HDS threw some
light on efficient storage and data management in a dynamic environment. “Cost
reduction and improving service levels as business grows are big challenges,”
said Venugopal. He put forward a four step procedure for service-oriented storage
solutions. This starts with classification of data and applications followed
by service level definition. Step three covers infrastructure/architecture selection
and design and as part of the last step, one should ensure a simple and efficient
way to manage the environment. Talking about the economics of service-oriented
storage, Venugopal said, “For every 12 TB of installed and usable disk
capacity, there is a net $1 million OPEX reduction possible which includes 25%
waste reduction and about 20% of outage time reduction.”
The future
Richard Villars, Vice President, Storage Systems Research, IDC gave his views
on the future of data centers. He said, “There is a need to improve responsiveness.
In past, recovering the next day was enough but today, we are all under pressure
to get things back to normal within an hour even if it is a hurricane situation.”
According to him, the key business challenges would be that of executing consolidation
and virtualization. On top of that, finding business savvy IT professionals
will be a key thing in the future. In terms of growth, IDC estimates that the
petabytes shipped will grow at CAGR of 85% and that disk systems hardware sales
will grow at a CAGR of 8%. “There has been tremendous growth in unstructured
data and in 2008, companies will buy more storage in data centers to support
unstructured data,” said Villars. He even feels that there will be an emergence
of diverse role based storage solutions and he concluded with a thought on Virtualization
2.5 which will handle unplanned downtime and in which server and storage virtualization
will work together. As part of the customer experiences of this region, Munish
Mittal, Vice President-IT, HDFC Bank gave a presentation on how HDS solutions
have helped them manage their storage and business in an efficient manner. “We
moved over 5 TB of data from RAID 1 to RAID 5 using HDS’s TSM and it has
helped us reduce maintenance downtime for our critical business application.
Towards the end, he gave a brief about HDFC’s plan to deploy CRM.
Moving from traditional storage to service-oriented storage and other variants
of virtualization are relatively new concepts for Indian as well as global organizations.
It will be interesting to see how these concepts take root in the market.
kushal.shah@expressindia.com
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