STORAGE: Hey, They Just Got a Little SAN-er

Storage has probably been the hot-test area in IT globally in the last few
years, more or less escaping the economic downturn. Despite enterprises reducing
their IT budgets, storage adoption was an area least affected by the
cost-cutting measures. The picture was no different in India. And with the first
signs of revival, enterprises have gone on an overdrive on the adoption of new
storage systems. While BFSIs have traditionally been at the forefront of this
trend, telecom has perhaps contributed the maximum into the kitty of most
storage providers. The rapid opening up of the telecom sector has led to an
explosion in subscriber base for most service providers, and this in turn has
necessitated addition of more storage systems. And with value-added services
becoming an important component of revenue generation, refurbishing the storage
infrastructure has assumed paramount importance.

VOICE&DATA attempted to look at the storage implementation by various
service providers. The idea was to examine whether there are some common trends
in terms of strategies or choice of technologies. Also important was to find out
whether storage purchase was purely requirement driven or mostly driven by
marketing campaigns of vendors, especially since most service providers are
currently on a strong financial wicket. The exercise involved the entire
spectrum of service providers–ranging from cellular players (GSM/CDMA),
long-distance players, to ISPs. Unfortunately, only a few of the service
providers were unwilling to share information about their storage
infrastructure. With the market becoming increasingly cutthroat, especially
following the unification regime, paranoia about giving out such information is
perhaps understandable.

However, before delving into individual cases of service providers, it would
not be out of place to identify some of the key storage related challenges being
faced by CIOs of the service providers. According to a study commissioned
specifically for Indian telcos by Brocade Communications Systems, the most
crucial challenge is the explosive data growth, with storage consumption
increasing by 60—80 percent annually. The technology itself has become
increasingly complex, with most service provider data centers now having two to
four storage vendors and three to five operating systems. Data availability was
another key issue with the respondents, with 38 percent of the end users
demanding improved restore time. But, perhaps, the most important issue was the
burgeoning storage management costs because of the formation of disparate
islands of data which come about due to the propensity among service providers
to have multiple direct attached storage (DAS) devices. A low DAS-utilization
rate of 30—35 percent automatically leads to escalation of administrative
costs. And most pertinently, though service providers now have fewer budgetary
constraints, the CIOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver on RoI (return on
investment) as well as TCO (total cost of ownership).

SAN-ity Prevails, Finally

VSNL, for so long the PSU incumbent, is gradually undergoing a mindset change as
a private player in a non-monopolistic environment. This attitudinal change is
also reflected in its storage policy–only six months ago it decided to migrate
from a multiple-DAS environment to a storage area network (SAN) one. Common
logic would suggest that this should have been done much earlier, storage
consolidation being absolutely crucial to ensure minimal downtime for the
service provider that still is the no.1 in international long-distance (ILD)
telephony by a long way besides being the largest ISP as well.

The primary benefits offered by the SAN architecture included reducing
downtime, cutting down on incremental costs, and providing high-speed
connectivity. Having multiple-DAS devices did not offer VSNL the flexibility to
handle failures which could have had serious repercussions on its business in
the long run, especially now with so much competition emerging. More
quantitatively, it achieved 40 percent savings in incremental costs involved in
purchase and deployment, as consolidation of devices created a huge virtual
storage pool. Optimization of storage was also achieved by means of a single
large virtual file system in SAN, which also resulting in substantial savings
for VSNL.

A typical service-provider environment where each data center has a disparate SAN creating different data islands               Source: Brocade Communications Systems

The current SAN installation is from Hitachi Data Systems with 2 TB storage
capacity, which VSNL plans to scale up to 5 TB later. The main applications
supported are one Netscape Internet messaging application; a billing solution
portal on an Oracle database backend; as well as voice, data, and network
analyzer applications.

Early Bird Advantage

Data Access is not only India’s no. 2 ILD operator (behind VSNL) it has
made its mark as an ISP as well, and is rapidly expanding operations beyond the
Indian shores. In sync with its image of a technology-savvy service provider–challenging
the incumbents hegemony–Data Access’s adoption of SAN preceded VSNL by
nearly two years. The immediate rationale then was the need for an online
platform for the billing application of its newly launched ILD services. The
application was running on Portal Software on Sun platform using Oracle
database.

Data Access went for HP’s XP512 Mission Critical Disk Array, configured on
a SAN no single point of failure (NSPOF) architecture. Also, the data needed to
be protected using an automated and online backup solution, for which Data
Access opted for online data backup solution using HP SS 4/60 LTO-based tape
library and Omniback software. Subsequently, its disaster recovery (DR) site
also opted for a SAN solution.

The SAN solution not only enabled Data Access to achieve complete online
billing, it also ensured protection of its critical billing data with minimal
downtime. These two crucial parameters have ensured that the SAN implementation
translated into direct revenues for the service provider.

Solution for Goliaths

Bharti Cellular, which offers GSM services in 15 circles, was driven by the
strategic objective to be the no. 1 in cellular business in India. Along with
its fixedline counterpart, Bharti has become the first service provider to cross
the $1 billion threshold. This naturally implied a substantial scale-up of IT
implementation in Bharti and storage was no exception. With Bharti having the
largest number of subscribers among GSM service providers, it is quite natural
that its storage requirements would be higher than other pure play GSM service
providers.

Its demand for increasing storage has been partially taken care of by having
a SAN from EMC located in its Gurgaon data center. The main applications ported
on the SAN are billing, fraud management, revenue assurance, and data
warehousing as well as some internal-facing applications like Oracle Financial
and Oracle HRMS. Even their DR site has a SAN installation. However, further
scaling up might witness a complete overhauling of this storage infrastructure
since the total remote management of its entire infrastructure has now been
handed over to IBM.

The storage network architecture in service provider environment is gradually transformed into a single consolidated data center with a DR site Source: Brocade Communications Systems

The biggest benefit that the SAN implementation has provided to Bharti has
been in managing the huge explosion of data while keeping costs under control.
Bharti scouted for three to five years for a massive storage solution that would
accommodate 5 petabytes of data and at the same time keep a tight leash on
costs. This was been taken care of by means of storage virtualization whereby
each single disk is optimized to its full capacity.

Consolidate, to Survive

Though BPL Mobile was one of the early starters as a GSM service provider,
it has not been able to match the growth rate achieved by some of its peers.
Amidst strong market speculations of an imminent sellout to a bigger player, BPL
Mobile embarked on a turnaround mission following a fresh infusion of external
funds. State-of-the-art technology deployment was an important component of its
turnaround strategy and therefore it was no wonder that it decided to
consolidate its various data center operations into a common data center by
means of an integrated NAS and SAN installation.

Managing the four distributed data centers at Mumbai, Pune, Coimbatore, and
Kochi was becoming extremely difficult, and disparate DAS devices were leading
to greater downtime. Subsequently, BPL Mobile’s QoS was fast plunging down to
newer depths. An integrated NAS-SAN environment at least ensured there could be
need-based allocation of storage resources to various applications. The
mission-critical core business applications required SAN and fiber-based drives
for storage. NAS-based storage was provisioned for data shared across multiple
downstream applications, which needed to be available online on ATA drives.

This integrated SAN-NAS environment was complemented by centralized backup
and retrieval systems as well as storage management tools. The new storage
architecture has definitely improved operational efficiencies in terms of
performance throughput, higher availability, and better manageability. The
distributed environment has lowered the TCO, at the same time, causing
improvement in SLA levels through optimal utilization of storage resources. The
consolidated storage environment definitely helped BPL Mobile when its very
survival was at stake.

A SAN-e Idea

Being one of the fastest growing GSM service providers, Idea Cellular relies
heavily on consistent and reliable access to data for transaction and
non-transaction related processes. Traditionally, in Idea, storage resided on
independent servers. This resulted in a host of performance and
operations-related issues. Manageability, integration, and application
deployment issues were becoming cumbersome and difficult to monitor. While data
storage, retrieval, and backup were the essential prerequisites of the storage
solution that Idea Cellular was seeking, deployment of the applications across
all access terminals across all locations was turning out to be the main
challenge.

Ultimately, Idea opted for a SAN-storage solution that entailed 5 SAN boxes
at five of its data centers at Pune, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, and Indore.
While HP VA7400 was deployed in Delhi, Gandhinagar, and Hyderabad; the HP XP512
was deployed in Pune; and HP VA7100 at Indore. For backup purposes, Idea
deployed HP Ultrium 4/40 at Pune and HP Ultrium 2/20 at Delhi, Indore,
Gandhinagar, and Pune. Each of the locations had HP Omniback II storage software
while HP Brocade switches connected the SAN boxes to the application servers at
each data center.

The rollout and deployment of the SAN storage solution in Idea was smooth and
post deployment, Idea Cellular has cut down on its costs associated with storage
and applications deployment. From a business standpoint, the accrued savings
have resulted in creating higher customer value at every stage of their
interaction with Idea Cellular.

Due to the implementation of SAN storage solutions, there is much more disk
space now to allocate a range of applications. Because of centralized management
of storage, the backup and retrieval of data and information has become easy.
This centralized storage strategy makes it easy for Idea Cellular to consolidate
the resources at its various locations with minimal downtimes.

Stop Duplication

Tata Tele Services Ltd (TTSL) was facing a predicament similar to many other
service providers. With its recent expansion into newer and bigger circles, the
logical follow up was more subscribers and consequently more data.



With difficulty in managing disparate DAS devices for different circles, TTSL
went for a SAN solution by consolidating storage so that it could plan and set
up a DR site in Mumbai without too much difficulty. Following consolidation of
its 11 servers, TTSL got rid of its DAS and implemented a SAN using Brocade
switches and an EMC Symmetrix 8830 box; later it set up the DR site with a
set-up similar to the SANs.

Storage consolidation for TTSL helped in better utilization of resources as
well as lowering the IT support manpower by 25 percent. But most importantly, it
has enabled TTSL from replicating its Hyderabad data center in other circles,
which would have been the case had it stuck to its earlier DAS setup. Through
consolidation, the service provider has managed to avoid this expensive and
time-consuming task. 

Emerging Trends

Some broad trends emerging from understanding the storage implementations at
different service providers can be summarized in the following manner.

• Most service providers are moving away from disparate DAS devices and
  consolidating in favor of a SAN environment
• There is a tendency to consolidate multiple data centers, especially
  amongst service providers who started earlier; this involves consolidation
  of multiple SANs since each data center typically has a separate SAN
• Have a consolidated data center and then replicate the environment in a DR
  site
• Mission-critical business applications are provisioned on SAN; in case of
  an integrated SAN-NAS environment, the downstream applications are allocated
  to NAS
• Consolidated SAN data center drastically reduces downtime, increasing
  business efficiency and cutting down on costs

• Moving towards optimization of a virtual storage pool
  with provisions for allocation of resources indicates adoption of
  information lifecycle management (ILM) framework though service providers
  are not calling it so

• Storage virtualization techniques have been embraced to
  ensure optimal capacity utilization of every disk.

Rajneesh De