Enterprise Storage: The Age of PetaBytes

Michael D Eisner, chairman and CEO, Walt Disney Company says

"The Internet needs content and it needs more of it every day. The fact is

that nobody signs up for the Internet due to the elegance of its Cisco routers.

Nobody logs on because of the Intel chip inside. No, they use the Internet in

ever-growing numbers because of the content. Right now that content is largely

information. But increasingly, it will also be entertainment". This clearly

sums up the need for storage. And India would be no different. According to an

IDC report, the total storage market in the country was of the order of 1,041

TeraBytes (TB) in 2000. Meaning, we have already crossed the age of terabytes

and stepped in PetaBytes (PB). This has been one of the most significant

achievements, living in the world of PB shipments. In terms of revenue, the

Indian marketplace saw a spending of over Rs 607.7 crore. This is just the

beginning.

The Indian Market Place

There are two types of architectures–direct attached and

network attached. And they can be either modular or centralized. Believes Binod

Panda, country manager, Apara Enterprise Solutions Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, a company

that has been one of the earliest evangelists in the promotion of storage

solutions in the country, "Customers will still need a mix of these or

either one of these. Network attached modular storage is getting more popular

and will be the trend in future. We are seeing more and more customers

preferring networked storage. It’s either NAS or SAN, as customers are looking

at storage consolidation". The spending pattern in the market in the

previous calendar year, confirms this. Though Direct Attached Storage (DAS)

accounted for the largest market share that is close to 70 percent, Storage Area

Networks (SANs) and Network Area Storage (NAS) solutions, finally, seemed to

have caught up with corporates. According to the IDC market findings, SANs and

NAS in 2000 accounted for Rs 50 crore approximately in value, and this is going

to go up considerably. IDC forecasts that while SANs will constitute for 49

percent of India’s external storage systems revenue in 2005, NAS will be 32

percent. And during the period 2000 to 2005, the Indian disk storage system

shipments are expected to grow at a CAGR of 95.2 percent to approximately 29.5

PB.

Storage is becoming very competitive. In fact, this market is

more competitive than the server market. There are more than ten players who are

offering their storage solutions in India and many more are eyeing the Indian

market. With the recession in US, almost everybody is trying to get in to the

Asian market, and India comes to mind first, for all of these players. Almost

all the major players, be it software or box pusher, have set shop in the

country. EMC, Hitachi, Quantum Snap Appliances, Tandberg, Veritas, Legato,

Seagate, Sanrise and many more are found here. The enterprise business is still

direct for most of the companies but to increase the focus and reach, many

vendors are working on a channel strategy. This is to ensure a complete

coverage. Says Louis Lye, business development manager, Asia-Pacific, Quantum

Snap Appliances, "Our focus is on sizing up the market, and we continue

using good partners to provide coverage and technical support". Invariably,

this has been the trend on the overall strategy–partnering and extending good

technical support. At the same time, spreading awareness on network storage was

the focus. This is just the beginning.

Network Storage Awakening

Network Storage Awakening

In terms of storage, it is only in the last one year that the

Indian industry has begun to be educated on enterprise storage and its benefits.

Says Srinivasan, "Hitherto, only server-based storage held its ground,

which the more mature economies and markets have moved out of. Unless the

customer understands the benefit of storage infrastructure, they will continue

to invest in server-based storage. Also the need to examine storage from a total

cost of ownership aspect rather than just the cost of procurement, is a mindset

that will evolve quite soon". With the need within enterprises for

efficient storage of data and resource-sharing, there is a paradigm shift from

direct-attached storage to networked storage, and more and more customers prefer

networked storage–be it either NAS or SAN. NAS seems to be popular wherever

there is a file-server requirement. "Moreover, heterogeneous platforms

demand a NAS solution, as it offers better price performance", claims

Panda. Adarsh Holavanahalli, director, corporate architecture, Sanrise, adds,

"India is a marketplace where the customer wants to maximize his resources.

Though on-site facilities management is a growing trend, customers now prefer

one console, one software, one management for all–approach for everything in

IT including storage".

Storage architecture: Points out Khan, "DAS, NAS and

SAN, are the current storage technologies available in the market. DAS works for

small setups and becomes a management nightmare in larger setups. Storage gets

fragmented and islands of information on different servers make for either

under-use of capacity, or even worse, loss of application and/or performance.

Taking backups becomes arduous, time-consuming and costly. NAS is limited to

niche applications and is ideal for access applications. It is a file-level

consolidation and as far as it is used just for file storage and retrieval, as

opposed to transactional manipulation, it is a good solution. However, it has

some concern areas, such as lower performance levels, low data security and

susceptibility to hacker attacks. It may also reduce the performance of LAN to

which it might be attached in the absence of a separate segment for its usage.

SAN is ideal for most uses. It caters to medium and large enterprises, with

requirements of medium to high throughput and high levels of data integrity.

Deploying SAN systems can be slightly more complex and comparatively more

expensive as compared to NAS. However, the advantages in the long run outweigh

initial expenses in deploying a SAN.

PK Gupta, director of engineering, Legato Systems India Pvt

Ltd sums it as "People are talking about iSCSI, Storage over IP, Infiband,

Virtual Interface (VI), Storage Resource Management (SRM), storage

virtualization, and finally storage consolidation".

He further adds a point of view from his top management in

Legato.

"If we look out next year, one of the critical areas

that users will deal with is consolidation. This is consolidation of storage,

servers and applications. They are going through this for a number of reasons.

They save costs because they reduce the amount of wasted storage and servers.

One of the keys to storage consolidation is storage networks.  I refer to

them as storage networks because I am not tying this specifically to SAN, which

implies fiber channel as the means to connect them. The storage will be

networked, but it will include NAS devices, SAN and new technologies, such as

Infiniband (being aggressively pushed by Intel) or SCSI over IP.  By having

networked storage, you have more freedom to use available space for the

appropriate server or application. The next step will be storage

virtualization. This means that all I need to do is request additional

storage for a server or application, and it will take it from the pool of

available storage on the network, the storage does not need to be in the same

file system, volume or even in the same disk enclosure. This will greatly

enhance the ability to allocate storage as needed, without the purchase of extra

TB of storage to have on hand.  There will also be a much less wasted

storage. Onto the next key area, which is management of storage.  Again,

for many of the reasons highlighted above and because it will take users a long

time to transition all of their environments to storage networks, and even

longer to get to virtualized storage, there is a strong need for tools known as

SRM. These tools help in determining storage capacity, such that you know

where you are, asset management, configuration management and many other

features important for knowing about what the state of your storage environment

(which may be attached to many servers) is.

Finally, the other area that is critical is–information

availability.  I use the term information, as you need both your data and

application to be available.  There is more and more need for immediate or

at least, very fast recovery from a failure. As for data availability, you still

need tape backup in case of data corruption, but you also need the data to be

available online for rapid recovery.  It is managing this combination of

data protection schemes that will be critical over the next twelve to eighteen

months".

Per MB spending to manage data: There are no concrete

responses. Says Khan, "It is difficult to say however, based on the

worldwide findings, a roundabout estimate in India would be of the total amount

a user spends in the first three years on their storage, just about 15 to 30

percent is accounted for by the initial solution cost, even in the most

expensive storage solutions". Panda believes that cost varies from Rs 5 to

Rs 50 according to the storage subsystem. Once the storage capacity goes ?? the

‘per MB’ prices lowers. This is for ‘Disk Subsystem’. Adarsh

Holavanahalli feels Indian customers spend about 2 cents an MB to manage data

today.

The Myths and Realities: The most prominent myth that one

encounters is that storage subsystems are expensive but do not deliver the

functionalities. Affirms Khan, "SANs can cost a crore and often much more

than that, however today, SANs



start at Rs 7 lakh.". Further, the solution providers allay the fears by
saying that there are a lot of R&D dollars that are spent to deliver the

best of solutions to customers. Most of the storage companies are focusing on a

lot of software solutions that deliver the functionality to the storage device.

Another myth is that new storage systems are very difficult to manage. "In

fact, SANs and NAS reduce storage management costs greatly. They have all the

management

utilities and plugs that allow them to be easily managed", says Alvin Ow,

regional SE manager, Veritas Software Corp. (Refer management costs chart).

Chandrasekhar adds another dimension, "Clinging to legacy storage solutions

of backend, SCSI disk drives and front-end fiber channel is a myth, and

advocates that end-to-end switched fiber with three-dimensional scalability like

the T3 storage solution from Sun is a reality". Khan points out to another

myth that bigger is better. Says Khan, "Several people still believe that

mainframes are the systems of choice for today and tomorrow, so do several

people that the bigger the storage system, the better. The fact of the matter is

that it is much better for any user, unless on mainframe systems, to go in for

modular storage systems that can grow with their needs. This way they can

benefit from newer and cheaper technologies in their growth phase ".

The Issues: Avijit Basu of HP points out, "From the

backup point-of-view, it is how much data capacity, backup, and restore window,

existing network bandwidth, applications, frequency of backup, type of

backup-full, differential, incremental. Are they looking at backup

consolidation? Are they looking at backup over a network, consolidation? Are

they looking at automation in tape, etc?

From the data spread over the enterprise–Are you looking at

business continuity? Is outage a problem, your applications are

mission-critical, you cannot afford any downtime. Is managing data a problem?

The storage is distributed, no one knows where free storage is available. How

does one manage the growth from multiple physical devices from a single logical

management point? Is data so critical, you are looking at disaster-recovery

system? Is bandwidth an issue? Another big challenge is that the type of data is

changing from simple application like e-mail (text to rich media attachment), a

two hour normal NTSC video, 3D movie, a high-resolution color still photo or a

two-minute audio, occupy from 20 MB to a few TB.

Demand Drivers

"The most important trend is an increased importance of complete solution in place of just the hardware."

Owais Khan,

business manager, enterprise storage, Compaq India

 

Various estimates place the growth of storage market to about

60 to 80 percent year on year. If true, where is the demand coming from? The

basic need to cope with data generation on a massive scale is the driving factor

for storage. With data storage encompassing data consolidation, high

availability, data integrity, manageability, scalability and interoperability in

a bandwidth-constrained environment, storage solutions have been progressively

evolving to suit customer needs.

Large enterprises have been the primary drivers for the

growing Indian storage market, considering the amount of digital information

they generate. The prevalence of the Internet is forcing enterprises to invest

in their networks and IT infrastructure. Most enterprises run data-intensive

applications like ERP and CRM with a high-accessibility rate, thus triggering

the need for network storage. ERP and CRM have dominated the market, and data

warehousing and data-mining have also started in a major way. Call center

markets are focusing on India seriously and they would be generating a lot

of data. Applications like Oracle and SAP, have fuelled this fire and this has

been doubling year after year. Most of the companies are dependent on IT, and

churn out data and reports on a regular basis. "Department of Space,

weather bureau, research programs, R&D, video, audio are a few others who

have contributed heavily", says Panda.

The demand will come mainly from enterprises operating in key

verticals like telecommunications/media, finance, manufacturing and retailing,

and of late, even the government sector. SMBs, though constrained for IT

budgets, have realized the need for efficient data storage. There is also the

software sector that depends hugely on data storage. Finally, the existence of

data-intensive business entities like ASPs and IDCs depends on efficient storage

systems. E-commerce has driven economies in to e-economies where data rates have

grown more than ten folds.

India being a big region, it is imperative to have a channel

strategy in place. Storage investment decisions! With the value of storage deals

getting bigger ad, bigger decision will be taken, more at the CEO, COO, CFO and

CTO levels. This is now treated as more of a corporate strategy and would need

to involve the top management.

The Critical Success Factor: Though these trends are visible

and technology available, "In India, specifically, corporates need to be

educated on the need to have mission-critical information infrastructure that is

available 24 x 7 and the role that storage infrastructure plays in making that

happen. Thus, all the Indian corporates were procuring storage along with the

servers, without considering the need for a unified information

infrastructure", reiterates Ramana of Cisco. Intelligent storage is

imperative when information needs are critical. The ability of storage to handle

tasks, such as backup, recovery and disaster recovery is fundamental. He

suggests. "An enterprise would require a multi-disciplinary team approach

on how SAN technologies can be designed and implemented in their business

environment. Another key area that needs to be addressed would be personnel

skill development across multiple platforms for successful deployment. SAN

network across a LAN is feasible today, while deploying them across Metropolitan

Area Networks and Wide Area Networks would have significant bandwidth

implications in terms of cost and availability. Options for an enterprise would

be either to build or outsource the storage network to an Internet data center

service provider".

The success factor would be how such storage service

providers leverage their infrastructure to provide reliable, secure and

cost-effective storage solutions to the enterprises. Vendors are giving more

importance to services and support. So all the business models will evolve

around services. In India, specifically, there will be a significant amount of

alliances made, more to get market and service reach. "The storage market

in India will grow tremendously as more and more organizations begin to realize

the value of corporate information. Applying a networking model to storage

environments has become a strategic necessity. Clearly, storage networking is

the storage architecture of the future", reiterates Basu Hurkadli.

Ch. Srinivas Rao

Top V

Top V

The leader of the pack!: According to the IDC estimates,

Compaq leads the pack in both TB shipments and value terms, in the total storage

market, followed by HP, IBM, Sun and Network Appliances, respectively.

Compaq has been on the roll. With a total shipment of 385.17

TB, Compaq is understood to have raked up Rs 216.95 crore in revenue. Agreeing

with the IDC’s estimates, Owais Khan, business manager, enterprise storage,

Compaq India, explains, "Our main focus was enterprise. And that continues

to be so. However, we are finding that more and more SMBs are coming up with

requirements that need NAS or entry-level SANs, in addition to tape restore

automation solutions. All three solutions from Compaq, today, start at under Rs

10 lakh and are therefore, suitable for SMB requirements too".

HP registered total sales worth Rs 134.3 crore in the

business and accounted for 22.1 percent of market share by value. "HP

offers end-to-end storage solutions. Today’s high-end storage does not provide

only hardware (high-end tape libraries, virtualization in disk arrays, SAN

switches, FC connectivity, no single point of failure disk arrays) but a host of

software for managing storage. You need solutions for optimizing storage,

storage builder, load balancing, integrating with network management, zero

downtime/serverless backup, LUN(Logical Units) management, etc".

IBM, according to IDC, is the third largest vendor with total

TB shipment of 109.31 TB of storage and Rs 89.33 crore. IBM is still in the

process of evaluating its data, nonetheless, according to Basu Hurkadli, country

manager, system sales, IBM India Ltd, "Our storage strategy is

channel-driven. Worldwide and in India, a conscious effort is being made to work

closely with IBM’s channel partners to provide total storage solutions.

Periodic hands-on training programs, complete with IBM certification, are

conducted to educate channel partners on IBM’s products and technology

offerings in this space. IBM India’s channel partners have invested in IBM SAN

solution centers, currently in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore".

Sun is the fourth largest vendor with total shipment of 92.65

TB and with revenue of Rs 78.39 crore, as reported by IDC. Without commenting on

the IDC estimates, B Chandrasekhar, regional storage product manager, network

storage, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd, added, "Our strategy was being

focused. Our storage solutions are through channels with strategic push by Sun

for networked storage–a massively scalable storage solution with performance

on pay ‘As You Need Basis’, with affordable upfront cost.

Network Appliance was at the bottom of the Top Five with total storage

shipment of 83.28 TB and revenue of Rs 38.29 crore, according to IDC. Says

George Thomas, country manager, Network Appliance, India, "The customer is

looking for a solution and it does not matter whether it is NAS or SAN. Network

Appliance has more than 100 installations of its filers in India. Our major

customers are Texas Instruments, Rediff, Times Internet and Cadence, to name a

few. A complete storage solution includes primary storage, tape libraries,

storage management software, etc. We partner with the industry leaders to

deliver a complete solution".