The recession has forced enterprises to look at their storage infrastructure
and focus on reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. Customers have been
careful with their storage spending and are looking at solutions which will help
them effectively utilize their storage resources. The average storage
utilization levels in the industry, typically hover in the range of 35-40%,
which means that there is significant headroom to get more out of the installed
capacity without increasing the IT spend. With technologies like de-duplication,
flexible clones and thin provisioning, enterprises are improving the utilization
levels to 65-70%, thereby giving them the ability to achieve 'more with less'.
The Recession Affect
The recessionary period accentuated the significance of storage and
protection of data across businesses, and at a lower price point than ever
before. It was required to reduce the cost per GB of storage. With businesses
having to trim IT spends and provide better SLAs to business units, a shift was
seen from the traditional approaches of storage procurement. Increasingly,
organizations are deploying unified storage with support for NAS, FC & ISCSI on
the same box. There was a heightened need to squeeze more out of the same box
than ever before, leading to extensive deployment of technology like
de-duplication, thin and dynamic provisioning and archival solution. With
storage becoming more complex, it is now, more than ever, being seen as a
separate vertical within IT departments alongside network and systems.
Expert Panel |
Surajit Sen, director, channel marketing and |
Even with an early recovery, the pressure on IT to deliver at a lower cost
will continue. In the coming years, the industry will see an increase in the
adoption of x86 virtualization in India. Enterprises of all sizes are expected
to move away from JBOD to network storage. In the future, the cost of useable
storage per GB will be driven down further by deployment of hierarchical
storage.
Hot Trends
Data center virtualization: Virtualization is a critical enabler of the
dynamic data center of tomorrow. In 2009, the industry saw a trend towards lower
cost modular storage that scaled out, through switch technologies like Ethernet
or RapidIO. The shortcoming of scale-out modular storage is the inability to
scale up.In 2010, experts believe that the demand for storage systems, that have
both the ability to scale-up as well as scale-out depending on performance and
capacity requirements will grow.
Cloud storage: Cloud computing is often used as a metaphor for the
Internet. Cloud storage serves to mask the complexity of IT infrastructure and
enables access to storage capacity as a 'pay as you grow' service.
Security: IT managers must strike a balance between mitigating
security risks and delivering the best infrastructure in terms of throughput,
availability, scalability, cost and complexity. Each organization must make its
own trade-off decisions based on its unique situation and the importance of its
data. In 2010, IT managers are planning storage investments or the use of third
party services will need to take into account key priorities like data
confidentiality, privacy, sanitization/eradication and security.
Ethernet storage: With Ethernet reaching the speeds of 10 Gbps, it has
become a viable storage networking medium for data centers. Fiber channel over
Ethernet (FCoE) is an encapsulation of fiber channel frames over Ethernet
networks. It allows organizations to consolidate FC storage networks with
existing LAN and data traffic over a unified Ethernet network. FCoE, complement
advances in server and storage virtualization to enable increased data center
efficiency. The ubiquitous presence of Ethernet networks and economies of scale
would ensure wide adoption by the industry at a fraction of the cost of fiber
channel.
Green storage: The real solution and offering for a green data center
requires an absolute rethinking of the data center. This ranges from the design
of the buildings and cooling systems they contain, to the extensive use of
virtualization to increased server utilization. Also, the use of energy
efficient equipment, to power supplies to smart, power managed processors. Green
network storage solutions range from the use of features like data
de-duplication technology, thin provisioning and dynamic provisioning which
reduce the required storage at any given point by conserving energy. Also
innovations at disk level such as low powered SATA drives, coupled with features
like drive spin down from OEMs like EMC provide a significant reduction in power
consumption. SSD HDD is now becoming mainstream with significant number of IT
vendors offering the same.
Improved Storage Services
Today, data centers are required to provide better responsiveness, energy
efficiency, and performance than ever before, often with lower budgets and a
shortage of qualified staff. This is an enormously difficult challenge because
it requires data center managers to evaluate and address each of these factors
across multiple technology components such as applications, compute platform,
network infrastructure, and storage systems to create a comprehensive solution.
Tips for CTOs
|
All levels of data center functionality must be addressed and included in the
master architecture plan. Data center managers must evaluate current designs to
determine how to best virtualize and consolidate applications, servers, storage,
and switching functions, while placing a continuing emphasis on maintaining a
dynamic, flexible, and efficient data center environment.
Storage area networking, particularly switch technology, has seen numerous
changes in the recent years. Specifically, switches have necessarily become more
complex to match increasing fabric functionality requirements. The goal of
storage services and support is to promote customer success with storage
technology.
3G and WiMax
The number of broadband connections will increase considerably with the
entry of 3G and WiMax. However, like any new technology, it will be some time
before India will see a mass adoption of these technologies. With broadband
Internet becoming easily accessible, content will become the king, and it will
all be driven from the Internet. This will fuel the demand for network storage
from service providers and Internet start-up companies. The proliferation of web
2.0-which has enhanced social content sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,
etc-is already being seen. The availability of high speed connectivity will
increase the usage of these sites which in turn will drive storage volumes since
this data has to be available on the cloud.
Another key driver that will increase storage deployments with the advent of
high speed access technologies is video streaming.
The Road Ahead
The emergence of high performance network attached storage (NAS) systems
from vendors can significantly change user cost dynamics. Centralized NAS can
help drive down costs of power, cooling, and data center floor space.
Given the current economic situation, many enterprises have become
conservative and are reluctant to spend. Change doesn't happen just because of a
great technology. Change happens because of the clarity of vision to see storage
technology as a change agent for business improvement and have the leadership
skills to apply new technologies to real business problems.
Vendors are focusing on enabling IT organizations to better align their
infrastructure to their business objectives, through technologies such as
storage virtualization, dynamic tiered storage, dynamic provisioning, and
gaining control and governance over their unstructured data environments.
Akhilesh Shukla
akhileshs@cybermedia.co.in