Network Storage: Moving Beyond 'Virtual' Limits

Year 2006 will soon be behind us, and a challenging new year

approaches. Bellwethers indicate a fast growth in storage with faster growth in

areas involved with data protection. Vendors have been trying to battle it out

to gain total supremacy for years. IT managers realized long ago that its RoI on

storage technolgies is important, but vendors have not. But, still vendors keep

on inventing the storage wheel. Recently, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) with its

innovation in storage virtualization connected itself with IT managers at CIO

Summit.

On the Virtualization Path



Hu Yoshida, CTO, HDS, admitted that storage is oversubscribed and underutilized.
"More budget is spent on maintaining the old because it becomes too

disruptive to migrate. Also, multivendor storage keeps price competitive but

adds to management costs. Cost has become crucial and should be spent in

technologies that can give RoI," he added.

Undoubtedly, its cheaper to buy storage today rather than hire

people to manage it. Today, CIOs don't want to give up what they already have.

They want additional capabilties to be added to the existing technologies, which

is much cheaper than migrating to a completely new concept, which they are not

sure on ROI. Storage virtualisation is one such concept.

It isn't a new concept, but it's getting a lot of attention

lately as the top storage vendors launch next-generation virtualization wares.

The vendors vary on their approaches; some put virtualization in the network,

while others put it at the edge or in the array. But, they all attack the same

basic problem-simplifying storage management. Hitachi, with its storage

virtualisation concept has been able to convince IT managers that there is more

to tape and disc storage.

Virtualizing storage has differnet methods. These methods are

characterized by whether the virtualization is done on the host, the storage

array or the SAN.

HDS offers controller-based virtualization with its TagmaStore

Universal Storage platform. It puts virtualization in the storage controller,

either as a separate appliance or built into the array. Since controller-based

virtualization is intimately connected to the storage arrays, controller-based

products generally do an excellent job of working with the storage, especially

in the event of errors or write failures.

The major drawback to controller-based virtualization is vendor

lock-in. In fact, in most cases, customers are not just locked into a vendor,

they are locked into a particular product line since storage controllers only

work with one product line. Another disadvantage is that controllers, by nature,

have the narrowest view of the SAN-essentially, they only see the storage

array. But, HDS is riding high and claims to have around dozen installations in

the country.

The Gameplan



Though Hitachi entered the Indian market a bit late-infact much later than
its competitor EMC-the Japanese storage giant is making up for lost time. A

growing reputation on reliability is helping Hitachi win more business. And,

Hitachi has been subjected to less criticism than EMC on interoperability-one

of the SAN industry's biggest problems.

The risk Hitachi runs is letting its focus on EMC, keeping it

from capitalizing on opportunities to sell its solutions to smaller companies.

Profit margins in the midsize market are slimmer, but revenue growth is

enormous.

But, slowly HDS is changing its gears and has started focusing

on SMB market as well. It is now enabling companies of all sizes to truly

realize the business benefits of Application Optimized Storage solutions, as now

even the smallest companies can enjoy the benefits of virtualization by

optimizing the performance of their most pressing business applications--such as

Microsoft Exchange or Oracle Financials--utilizing the logical partitioning

capabilities of Hitachi's integrated new fleet of midrange offerings.

The challenge in front of HDS is to deliver world-class

enterprise service to its top-tire customers with limited resources.

Conventional midrange storage leaves much of this market under-served. However,

Hitachi has addressed this issue with the cost-effective network storage

controller, delivering high-end function in a user-friendly form factor.

As organizations look to move beyond tape -- currently the

predominant storage medium for long-term retention-utilizing disk storage

technology for backup and recovery operations has become an attractive method of

improving reliability, reducing backup windows, achieving greater data

throughput performance and ensuring rapid recovery. Until now, however, the

migration to current disk-based solutions has been causing disruption and costly

downtime in legacy IT systems. Hitachi Data Systems has virtual tape library

solutions that requires no changes to existing backup policies, practices, or

procedures.

Delivering on its plan to increase market share in SME

worldwide, HDS has entered into a global distribution agreement with Ingram

Micro, the world's largest technology distributor. Under the agreement.

Bolstering its high-end storage virtualization market

leadership, HDS has shipped more than 4,500 intelligent virtual storage

controllers worldwide, outpacing competitors still attempting to gain a foothold

in this critical market

HDS is already on top as far as enterprise customers are

concerned. HP and Sun Microsystems sell HDS boxes to their enterprise customers

and HDS has no plans to compete with its partners in this space.

HDS is slowly and steadily making progress and has drawn some

major expansion plans to gain foothold in the region. It is also continuously

investing in its labs, which acts as demo centers to its customers.

Though HDS is making right moves, still lot needs to be done to

be the king of storage times.

Rahul Gupta in Phuket



rahulg@cybermedia.co.in