NETWORK STORAGE: Vanilla Terabyte Ain't Enough

If information is power, storage is the reservoir of that power. Enterprises

can do better in their business with a storage solution that takes care of not

only their present needs but also future ones.

As information and knowledge has become the key to the success of all

businesses, data, next to employees, has emerged as the second most valuable

asset of an organization. The data that is stored today could pay dividend over

the years and would be key to the achievement of an organization’s business

goals. However, storage is still not a plug and play affair for enterprises.

They must go through a complex web of technologies and solution to understand it

better.

Technology Options

SAN or NAS, or the Best of Both? The debate that whether an enterprise

should go for SAN or NAS is increasingly becoming irrelevant. In fact the terms

SAN and NAS would soon be junked. What is emerging instead is a convergence of

SAN and NAS evolved into a single technology that includes the benefits of both.

Enterprise must accept (some have already) that any efficient storage

infrastructure requires both SAN and NAS. Some industry observers believe that

in three to five years, customers will insist on multilingual systems that can

speak block-based protocols, like Fiber Channel and iSCSI, as well as file-based

protocols.

n Enterprise

Storage Automation: It could be every enterprise’s dream come true as far

as managing storage is concerned. Enterprise storage automation manifests a

comprehensive range of solutions that integrate all major areas of storage

management – data availability, storage resource management, media management,

and SAN and NAS storage management. It will provide the foundation for

intelligent, rules-based, and policy-driven storage management. It will

automatically discover storage resources as they are added to the infrastructure

and intelligently configure those resources, allocate capacity, balance

workloads, move data to the most appropriate storage, and manage backup and

recovery. To top it all, all this can be done without the involvement of a

storage administrator; at the same time, it will provide for full administrative

and managerial control whenever necessary.

n Disk-to-disk

to Tape: Tape isn’t dead but it is fast loosing its prominence as a backup

medium to disk. Not only are disks getting cheaper and better, they also offer

faster back up. The tape drive takes 20 times longer to backup and retrieve data

than disk drive. Tapes are now used more for archiving. Historically, tape has

been the preferred method used because apart from being cheaper than disk

drives, tape cartridges were portable and could be stored away from the computer

system. On the other hand, the disk drive was internal to the PC, it could not

be removed and/or stored easily or conveniently. However, today the cost of disk

drives is as competitive as tape systems. Even more important is the fact that

tape is slow and sequential making it difficult to find files quickly. Disk

drives on the other hand, offer direct random access, significant time saving

(time = money), and read/write efficiency that translates into increased

productivity and lower operating costs. Overall, disk-to-disk backup technology

enables fast, transparent protection and dramatically speeds time to recovery.

n SNIA Shared

Storage Model: The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Technical

Council has developed a framework that captures the functional layers and

properties of a storage system, regardless of the underlying design, product, or

installation. Much like the OSI 7-layer model in conventional networking, the

SNIA Shared Storage Model may be used to describe common storage architectures

graphically, while exposing what services are provided, where interoperability

is required, and the pros and cons of each potential architecture. The model

describes architectures, but it is not itself an architecture. You cannot buy

it, or a system that it describes by specifying it in a bid, or a request for a

bid. You cannot "build it". Shared storage is a powerful concept,

bringing together into single storage systems essentially unbounded collections

of interconnected and geographically unconstrained storage resources and

management capabilities. The power of the shared storage environment lies in a

richly interconnected set of resources and defining the storage environment as a

storage system in its own right. The former opens many avenues for exploiting

connectivity. The latter enables the storage system to be the focus of

invention, deployment, and operation as an entity independent of the hosts that

it serves. The SNIA Shared Storage Model has three main components within its

scope: the file/record layer, which includes databases and file systems; the

block layer, which includes both low-level storage devices and block-based

aggregation and finally a services subsystem, which provides functions such as

the management of the other components.

n Hierarchical

Storage Management (HSM): HSM is a policy-based management of file backup

and archiving in a way that uses storage devices economically and without the

user needing to be aware of when files are being retrieved from backup storage

media. Although HSM can be implemented on a standalone system, it is more

frequently used in the distributed network of an enterprise. The hierarchy

represents different types of storage media, such as redundant array of

independent disks systems, optical storage, or tape, each type representing a

different level of cost and speed of retrieval when access is needed. The HSM

name signifies that the software has the intelligence to move files along a

hierarchy of storage devices that are ranked in terms of cost per megabyte of

storage, speed of storage and retrieval, and overall capacity limits. Files are

migrated along the hierarchy to less expensive forms of storage based on rules

tied to the frequency of data access. File migration and retrieval is

transparent to users. Two major factors, data access response time and storage

costs determine the appropriate combination of storage devices used in HSM. A

typical three tier strategy may be composed of hard drives as primary storage on

the file servers, re-writable optical as the secondary storage type, and tape as

the final tertiary storage location. If faster access is required, a hard drive

can be considered as an alternative to optical for secondary storage, and WORM

(Write Once, Read Many) optical can also be implemented, in place of tape, as

the final storage destination. HSM is complimentary to, but by no means a

replacement for, data backup and archiving. The major purpose of backup and

archiving is to ensure recovery of data on the server if a disaster occurs. The

main goal of HSM is to better manage data storage costs and administration.

n iSCSI

Standard: This year enterprises can expect lots of products based on iSCSI

standard. A number of storage solutions have announced support for iSCSI

following the standard’s ratification recently by the Internet Engineering

Task Force (IETF). iSCSI (pronounced "I-scuzzy") allows the creation

of less storage area networks (SANs) using Ethernet infrastructures at a less

expensive rate than traditional Fibre Channel protocols. This would bring down

the cost of storage networks down. The Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol enables

block level data to be accessed anywhere within an IP/Ethernet network.

n Storage

Virtualization: Storage virtualization is one of the hottest areas today.

Why? The need for storage is rising exponentially, and storage virtualization

allows users to cut costs and increase flexibility. Put simply, storage

virtualization separates the representation of storage to the server operating

system from actual physical storage. Storage virtualization promises to enable

users to pool together data from any type of physical device. Here, the pooling

can be done irrespective of the vendor or device type. However, vendors have

been providing their own definition of the term, depending on whether they are

offering virtualization at the storage device, network device or server level.

But what remains to be seen is whether virtualization solutions offered by

vendors are fulfilling the promise of unifying devices. According to Aberdeen

Group, storage virtualization offers the ability to logically consolidate or

pool storage from various vendor sources and/or various storage systems on a SAN

and control over how that logical storage is configured and used. It also offers

utility software services such as remote mirroring and point-in-time snapshot

copying to facilitate ensuring business continuance and dynamic storage

re-configuration without interrupting applications running on host servers

connected to the storage.

n Storage over

IP (SoIP): Storage over IP is gaining attention as the SAN market continues

to grow. SoIP aims to bring together differing network technologies and

standards to help business implement storage networks that offer SAN-like

functionality but leverage the ubiquity of IP-based infrastructure. SoIP also

aims to ease interoperability issues between fiber channel-based SANs by

offering a faster, easier way to manage, implement and maintain storage-area

networks. Vendors are using two techniques when developing SoIP SANs: tunneling

and native IP-based storage. Tunneling, which encapsulates Fiber Channel SAN

frames in IP packets for transport to another Fibre Channel SAN, makes sense

only when transporting information between Fibre Channel-based SAN islands.

Native IP-based storage integrates existing storage protocols, SCSI and Fibre

Channel, with IP protocol to develop native IP and gigabit Ethernet-based SANs.

n Storage

Consolidation: Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It will

facilitate drastic reduction in storage costs (if planned and configured well),

and improves the overall quality of storage. Storage consolidation is the

pooling and allocation of shared storage resources among numerous application

servers. Instead of directly attaching devices to workstations and servers, the

network provides access to storage which is on a need/access rights, and timely

basis. Storage consolidation architectures are designed to address limitations

associated with DAS.

Buying Tips

n Standards: Since

the storage industry is yet to agree on a single standard, the best an

enterprise can do is to go for products and solutions that supports all the

prevalent standards and protocols and is interoperable with products and

solutions of the maximum number of storage and networking vendors. In other

words, a solution or product must be interoperable with heterogeneous server,

operating systems, storage software products, network connectivity elements, and

other devices ranging from HBAs and drivers to switches and tape subsystems.

n Scalability:

Today storage needs are growing at a fast speed owing to a number of

factors. This means that not only should one deploy solutions keeping in mind

the needs of the next two-three years but also a solution that is easily

scalable. And it must be optimized to meet demands for capacity, new

applications, and service levels.

n Flexibility:

A storage solution must offer ease of integration, installation,

configuration and operation.

n Look for

These as well: Look for the backup and restore speed offered by the

solution. See if the storage software has a centralized cross platform

enterprise administration for all platforms from a web-styled interface? Does it

have integrated disaster recovery & bare metal restore? A solution must have

industry-leading consolidation capabilities and advanced software functionality

and availability and data integrity to provide end-to-end information protection

Market Information

Year 2001-02 saw storage requirements expanding on one hand and IT budgets

getting squeezed on the other. The size of the total Indian storage market in

terms of volume was approximately 1,700 TB. This was a growth of 70 percent in

terms of volume.

Direct attached storage (DAS) predominates the Indian storage market, with a

market share of 74 percent. This, however, is less than its 80 percent share in

2000-01. Storage area network (SAN) and network area storage (NAS) accounted for

16 percent and 10 percent of the market share respectively. The reasons for slow

migration of enterprises to network storage include cost and

implementation-related issues, poor client awareness and the pressure to justify

RoI.

The storage software market is valued at Rs 73.5 crore, a growth of 70

percent over the previous year. HP-Compaq at 63 percent accounted for the

biggest market share in the hardware space, followed by IBM, Sun, and Network

Appliances.

While there were a lot of activities happening on the storage

hardware front, the storage software front also witnessed a flurry of

activities, with quite a few vendors establishing or augmenting their marketing

activities in India. Besides established players like Computer Associates, other

players began to put India on their map of operations. While vendors like

Brocade established their presence in India, Veritas set up its marketing

activities, previously it just had a development center here.

In late 2001, virtualization emerged as a buzzword with most

vendors announcing their plans and unveiling their strategies of management

software. At the fabric and router levels, the players are HP-Compaq and

Brocade. Veritas has moved virtualization into the fabric level for NAS and SAN

from the host level. Players at the host or server-based levels are Sun, CA, IMB,

EMC, Compaq, and HP. Virtualization is said to realize the full potential of a

SAN and NAS environment. There are vendors offering solutions for NAS. For the

SMEs, virtualization in a NAS environment is possible but not with DAS. Storage

virtualization is yet to make way into India.

Enterprise storage solutions are generally more complex and

extensive and are used by large and medium organizations. As SMEs move up the

value chain in terms of intelligent use of information, they will be forced to

consider the use of intelligent enterprise storage.

Banking and insurance, telecom, and energy segments, are

witnessing an exponential increase in their storage requirements and are

shifting to a network storage environment.

EXPERTS PANEL

Agendra Kumar, country manager, Veritas Software

Arun Rao, national manager (storage business), CA

P K Gupta, director strategic development (intercontinental operations), Legato Systems

Simon Harvey, MD–APAC (storage solutions group), Quantum Corporation

T Srinivasan, country manager, EMC

Vikas Nandalal, sales specialist and product manager (storage services), Tata Internet Services