NETWORK STORAGE : Taking Control

Today's IT infrastructures are strained by a deluge of information in
multiple formats like files, databases, videos, images, and mails. The fact is
that a wide array of data is coming from completely new sources-consumers-and in
completely new forms. This new digital information, which tends to replicate
itself uncontrollably, is not subject to the traditional best practices of the
data center. The problem is that today's IT infrastructures were not designed to
deal with these new challenges-from security and privacy to the need to store,
manage, protect, leverage, and retrieve critical information.

The challenge becomes quite evident as we look at an IDC report, which
suggests that information will be growing at a CAGR of 57% between 2006 and 2010
to reach 988 exabytes.

With the increase in the data that gets stored, it becomes crucial to manage
that data intelligently. With rapid networking, enterprises need to give
round-the-clock access to their apps and data, and for that a well-managed
storage management strategy is a must.

Market Dynamics

The massive growth in storage is mainly due to the multitude of applications
like ERP/SCM in a company's network that draws information from one other.
Moreover, the growing regulatory environment-Basel II, HIPAA, SOX, Clause 49 of
SEBI listing, and the IT Act-compels organizations to protect the information
for longer time periods and the ability to recover it faster.

Information governance is indeed a key part of our storage strategy.
Archiving of the email is critical and is required by various regulations.
Moreover, other forms of communication need to be intelligently archived.

According to a study done by the University of California at Berkeley,
information is growing at 60-70% annually, while IT budgets are growing at only
3-5% a year.

Given the fact that information is increasing at a fast pace, enterprises
need to review their information infrastructures and implement a strategy that
could help them minimize risk and at the same time help them store, manage, and
protect information assets cost effectively.

From a business perspective, companies need to focus at harnessing
information as a competitive differentiator. The key areas of interest for
customers include tiered storage, SAN and NAS consolidation, iSCSI for low-cost
IP-based SANs, gateways, and server virtualization.

NAS started as a storage technology for sharing data within engineering
organizations, primarily in the Unix environment. It gained rapid acceptance in
the Web services space, with its ability to serve files to a large number of
users simultaneously.

With the proliferation of Microsoft Technologies, NAS added multi-protocol
support for users. It also made the process of data consolidation and data
sharing incredibly simpler, and organizations from a variety of industry
verticals started putting more applications on NAS systems.

NAS systems also evolved in terms of performance, scalability, and
availability. The final frontier was enterprise applications. Today, NAS systems
are used to run mission-critical applications like ERP and CRM.

The NAS market in India is forecast to grow at roughly 20% y-o-y. The key
verticals driving this growth are IT services, engineering design, HPC, offshore
development, Web services, digital animation, and media.

NAS is widely used and accepted as a mature technology leveraging on industry
standard protocols like NFS and CIFS.

Meanwhile, on the SAN front, the key drivers are database-based applications
and emails, and the nature of these applications demand fast access to storage,
which can be provided only by SAN deployments.

The enterprise customers are consolidating their infrastructure and looking
for tiered storage in SAN to optimize cost while meeting their performance SLAs.

Though customers are deploying SAN for many applications, they continue to
prefer NAS for applications that require file serving and sharing. Therefore,
experts feel both SAN and NAS will coexist.

Vendors, Up Close

In sync with massive demand for storage, vendors over the last year
positioned their offerings across segments from large enterprises to SMBs. Take
the case of EMC, which has grown its portfolio of capabilities with its movement
from being a pure play hardware firm to a complete information infrastructure
company with more than twenty-five acquisitions in the recent years.

A majority of EMC's acquisitions, including Legato, Documentum, Dantz,
Smarts, and RSA Security, have strengthened its core storage offering while
expanding its reach into new, opportunity-rich adjacent markets such as
enterprise content management, network management, and security. In the last two
years, EMC has invested more than $2.7 bn on ten acquisitions to broaden its
products portfolio and services. EMC also has strengthened its core offerings
and expanded into new markets.

Meanwhile, IBM pitched hard on the open standards-based portfolio in storage
and systems, and tuned its solutions aimed at big and small enterprises to
effectively manage storage infrastructure issues. IBM aligned its solutions on
system storage and total storage products with an emphasis on infrastructure
simplicity and lower TCO.

As far as storage is concerned, simplicity seems to be the flavor. In line
with that, storage major HP has offered a slew of storage solutions. For SMB
customers, HP offered a comprehensive range of solutions aimed at managing
consolidation, file services, and business protection.

Meanwhile, on the large enterprise front, HP has announced products with
enhanced encryption and security, like StorageWorks, Secure Key Manager, and
StorageWorks 9000 Virtual Library System.

Network Appliance, also known as NetApp, on the other hand, promoted Unified
Storage-that is SAN and NAS out of the same storage system.

By using a single platform for both kinds of data access, organizations can
optimize their usage of disks, use common backup and replication tools, and save
costs on storage administration. This obviously makes much more sense than
building storage “silos” and having to end underutilizing disk space in each
silo, administer separate back-up and replication strategies for each, and
invest in more management resources.

NetApp also pitched hard on integrated data management (IDM) that enables
administrators to manage data from a business perspective.

IDM separates the management of data from the management of its physical
storage, and integrates that management into the applications and workflows of
data owners. This separation is achieved through the use of datasets (basic
units of aggregated data that share similar characteristics), policies that
describe how the data is to be managed, and access control that limits what can
be done. The storage administrator creates these policies, while integration
tools can be used by the data owner directly and without involving the storage
administrator.

Sun Microsystems, on the other hand, took to the strategy of meeting customer
expectations-its products started in small configuration and scaled all the way
up to 225TB-plus without requiring any replacement of headers.

Further, Sun laid emphasis on performance with the scalability by separating
hardware RAID controllers. Going forward, Sun will be using Solaris 10 as the OS
for NAS. In terms of concepts like ILM and virtualizations, all vendors tapped
into the demands of large enterprises, which went up further in the storage
maturity curve.

Key Trends

Storage is a dynamic entity, and technology keeps changing. Hence, it
becomes imperative for CIOs to explore newer ways of optimizing their storage
environment. IP-based storage has gained ground in the recent times. Experts say
that IP-based storage has attained increased prominence at the enterprise level,
and is driving the adoption of SAN; it helps in total network storage
consolidation of storage resources at lower cost and centralized storage
architecture.

IP SAN is the traditional SAN over IP. It is based on standards called iSCSI
or FCIP. IP SAN helps centralize the storage infrastructure and provides total
consolidation to the storage infrastructure by connecting standard servers.
Traditional SAN is limited by distance, but IP SAN can help overcome that
limitation by connecting geographically distributed servers and networks.

The market for virtualization worldwide is huge ($15 bn by 2009, according to
IDC) and IDC recently reported that widespread adoption of virtualization
technology will take place over the next two years, and 45% of the new servers
purchased next year will be virtualized.

Market acceptance of virtualization had been slow, but now robust,
enterprise-class storage virtualization solutions have gained footprint in the
market.

Companies that have large, diverse, and complex IT environments are
increasingly implementing virtualization solutions. Some verticals that are
showing interest in implementing virtualization solutions are
telecommunications, financial services, and retail industries. But the interest
in these solutions is certainly not confined to these verticals.

Experts say that the Indian market has increasingly realized the importance
of networked storage, and the adoption rate is high. An organization can ensure
optimum benefits from its storage network technology, whether it is SAN or NAS,
through deployment of ILM.

A successful information lifecycle management strategy must be business
centric and policy driven. It should also be centrally managed so that one can
get a 360-degree view of the scheme of things. More importantly, it has to be
aligned with the value of the data. These ingredients will make for a successful
ILM implementation.

What emerges at the end of the day is that storage management is getting
complicated and the common denominator that every CIO has to strike is arriving
at a strategy that takes the complexities out of the day-to-today management of
storage. The information deluge is making it imperative for organizations to
redesign their IT strategy, putting information at the center.

Shrikanth G

shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in