Managing Storage Woes

Storage of
information is one of the most critical tasks for any organization, especially
for the telecom operators these days. The telecom subscriber base in India is
more than 500 mn as of now and still adding 8-10 mn subscribers every month.
Addition of every subscriber means addition of fresh data.

Considering the government and company
regulations regarding retention of old data and archiving, it will pose a
challenge for the IT department of a telecom operator in one of the fastest
emerging telecom markets in the word.

"Data storage is an important and integral
part of any telecom company. With the ever growing size and associated
maintenance, it has also become expensive. Data storage for a longer duration
has become critical not only to provide a satisfactory customer service but also
as a legal requirement. Authorities often approach a telecom company for
customer details, their login reports, type of traffic, mail details, VoIP
details, etc," points out EVS Chakravarthy, CEO, YOU Broadband.

Besides, it is also extremely difficult to
assess what would be the storage requirements in the near future related to
trends, projects in development, or pending business alliances. The biggest
challenge on the data front would be the launch of 3G and WiMax services in
India, along with subscriber additions every month. The launch will result in
data hungry VAS services and applications, which will end up in increasing pain
for storage and related infrastructure.

Money Matters

Keeping data safe and secure is a costly affair, especially when telcom
operators are reporting loss in revenues following depleting tariffs that
touched rock bottom recently with the launch of per second billing.

Further, providing cost effective, secure,
scalable, and reliable storage infrastructure is very difficult to achieve.
Telecom operators generate data every moment whenever a user makes a call or
sends an SMS. Moreover, data also keeps piling up in the form of emails,
documents, databases, etc. Hence, storage needs keep increasing with time, and
lot of IT resources are consumed in managing storage related activities. As per
an industry estimate, data would grow 200-300% in the next few years. This will
shrink IT budget of telecom operators further.

Storage challenges for IT professionals in
telecom industry become more complex in today's environment of rapid
obsolescence of storage hardware and digital media. Success in the storage
solutions game means deftly juggling budget, regulatory compliance, upgrades to
online data storage devices, bullet-proof data backup software, and storage
related information security risk issues-all while minimizing storage system
downtime.

Subscriber Info

Capital expenditure budgets of telecom operators globally, especially
spending on subscriber data management (SDM) solutions is expected to increase
in the high double-digit percents annually for at least the next four years.
Regulatory issues, launch of 3G services and the growing number of mobile
subscribers-especially in emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil-would
drive the global SMD market.

As per a report published by Infonetics,
the worldwide total SDM market will grow to $789 mn in 2013. This is remarkable,
considering that in 2008 it was below $200 mn mark.

SDM solutions are increasingly being
viewed as strategic tools that can help operators better monetize their existing
assets by allowing them to extract, normalize, analyze, and pass on valuable
subscriber information to their marketing teams. Further, as per the regulation,
operators have to keep the subscriber database for a certain period of time. The
data has to be maintained in such a way that it could be extracted in the
minimum possible time.

"However, the primary challenge for
operators in implementing SDM strategies isn't the available technology, but
overcoming legacy mindset and opening up data silos that exist within the
organization. This requires a c-level mandate," points out Shira Levine,
directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research.

Managed Storage Services

Research has shown that the average cost of managing storage is three to
five times higher than the cost of purchasing it. To overcome these difficulties
and to let telecom operators and enterprises focus on their core business, plus
to make storage more cost effective, managed storage services are becoming
popular and coming up as a great alternative to conventional storage management.
A few of the leading telecom operators in India have opted for managed storage
services.

"Companies are not willing to spend huge
amounts on their server infrastructure. Instead, they prefer to outsource.
Hence, managed storage service has become common in recent times so as to focus
on core activities," Chakravarthy says.

Managed storage services provide on-demand
storage capacity; monitoring and management services for clients' disk; data
backup; and archive infrastructure in a security rich environment. Combining
best-in-class networking technologies with world-class service management helps
enable highly available, cost effective storage management. The best part is
that it is flexible, scalable, resilient storage capacity. It's on-demand and
centralized remote management; provides 24x7 monitoring; and offers management
and allocation based pricing.

Managed storage services are helping
telecom operators to manage their increasingly large and complex storage
environments, so they can focus on strategic business activities. Major
advantages of managed storage services are that more space can be ordered as
required. Depending upon your SSP, backups may also be managed. Faster data
access can be ordered as required. Also, maintenance costs may be reduced,
particularly for larger organizations who store large or increasing volumes of
data. Another advantage is that best practices are likely to be followed.
Disadvantages are that the cost may be prohibitive for small organizations or
individuals who deal with smaller amounts or static volumes of data; and that
there's less control of data systems.

The Options

Managed storage service is normally accessed via a network (LAN), or a
series of networks (Internet). However, managed storage may be directly attached
to a workstation or server, which is not managed by an SSP.

Managed storage generally falls into two categories-locally
managed storage and remotely managed storage.

Locally managed storage: Advantages of
this type of storage are a high speed access to data and greater control over
data availability. But one disadvantage is that additional space is required at
local site to store the data.

Remotely managed storage: Advantages of
this type of storage are that it may be used as an off-site backup, it offers
global access (depending upon configuration). Hence, adding storage will not
require additional space at the local site. However, if the network, which is
providing connectivity to the remote data, is interrupted, there will be data
availability issues.

Outlook

At the end of the day, what emerges is that despite the downturn, the Indian
market for network storage is on a growth path. The ongoing year will see
escalation of new concepts like thin provisioning, deduplication, thin cloning,
thin replication, and IP storage. Server virtualization would also drive storage
demand. Experts aver that the overall network storage market in India will
sustain the ongoing momentum during FY 2009-10. Customers will continue to
invest in technologies that provide cost reduction, competitive advantage, and
RoA. The adoption of proven technologies, such as virtualization, and their
capabilities, like dynamic provisioning, tiered storage, file and content
services will increase.

Akhilesh Shukla

akhileshs@cybermedia.co.in