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STORAGE: It Gains Higher Ground

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

Throughout 2001 and 2002, when economic slowdown and downturn was having

serious repercussions on IT spending by Indian enterprises, storage was one

area, which remained fairly unaffected. A major reason for this was that the

telecom sector in the country was starting on an upward curve, despite the

global slump in the sector. Finally, in 2003, when overall industry witnessed a

revival, storage got a tremendous boost thanks to the telecom revolution that

was sweeping the country. The added incentive was the sunrise BPO sector.

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While the total storage market in the country in 2002—03 was pegged at Rs

700.21 crore, most industry experts believe that the telecom vertical would

contribute somewhere between 20—25 percent of the overall pie. This translates

into a total market share of around Rs.150—160 crore, out of which about

Rs.130—140 crore would go into hardware while the rest went into storage

software. According to VOICE&DATA estimates, in 2003—04 this market would

grow by more than 15 percent, primarily because of the whopping growth in

subscriber base by most of the telecom service providers. The BPO industry

contributed about 8—10 percent of the storage market, which translates to

something between Rs.50—70 crore.

The Telco Push



According to PP Subramanian, country manager, Hitachi Data Systems, India,

storage of information in the telecom sector is largely driven by the post paid

services segment and this includes all types of services that is offered by

telecom service providers such as voice services, data services such as SMS,

MMS, etc. This is because for each of these services they need to maintain

records of the billing information of the subscribers and customers. One of the

key drivers behind the storage of the telecom data is the CDR (caller data

records) that the government expects the Telcos to store for 7 years. Therfore,

just as RBI and SEBI guidelines drove the storage market in the BFSI sector,

TRAI regulations are expected to give the relevant push for telecom.

Manoj

Chugh,
president, EMC



India and Saarc
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Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and Saarc puts the entire storage push from

telcos under a single perspective. "New technologies are evolving, user

demands are increasing (the anytime, anywhere access expectation), and as we

have seen over the last 18 months, the users themselves are increasing at an

exponential rate. All this means more competition, network expansion and

attendant complexities. At the same time, deregulation, legal rulings,

regulatory requirements and converging markets have created an environment of

compliance, intense price comparisons and pitched battle for market share."

As a result three fundamental issues are facing telecom companies in India

today:

  • A need for greater operation efficiency and cost containment, which means

    streamlining processes and improving functionality
  • A need to come up with more efficient ways to develop and deliver new

    services to the market place as a means to strengthen market position and

    create new revenue opportunity
  • A need to map out and integrate new/improved workflow processes

From a solutions perspective, the success of storage

solutions will be determined largely by their ability to unify business and

operations support systems, while integrating two historically separate worlds:

the networking operations and engineering world, and that of data/information

management.

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This was the year, which saw Reliance entering into the fray

and then chalk up a record in customer acquisition. Other CDMA service providers

like Tata Teleservices and BSNL too followed suit with impressive numbers, while

GSM operators like Bharti, Hutch and Idea Cellular did not lag behind much in

the numbers game. What this record addition of subscribers ensured was the need

for additional storage infrastructure, that too in gargantuan proportions, for

nearly every functionality like billing, CRM database, network monitoring,

business intelligence, fraud management, online disaster recovery sites and

customer care amongst others.

SAN Shows the Way



While most enterprises in the country were either still contemplating or

just migrating to network-based storage like NAS from file-based systems like

DAS, most telecom service providers, at least the large ones, completed their

implementation of SAN during the year. Because SAN is based on fiber channels,

most enterprises in the country still hesitate for adoption since it turns out

to be expensive. Not so for these telcos, since addition in their subscriber

base necessitated migrating to a faster and more reliable mode of storage. And

this meant a thriving year in terms of business for the galaxy of storage

vendors too. BPO too was a substantial contributor, thanks primarily to their

stringent business continuity requirements, which necessitated the growth of

online backup sites. Besides, this sector largely dealt with customer services,

which require maintaining and updating information on customers, fueling the

need for storage solutions.

One of the biggest gainers from the vendor side during the

year was Sun Microsystems, whose SAN solutions were implemented by both Reliance

Infocom as well as Bharti, the biggest spenders amongst service providers in the

CDMA and GSM space respectively. HP, the storage vendor with the largest share

of the overall pie, too had a more than fruitful year implanting SAN in Idea

Cellular as well as Data Access. Bharti also purchased a SAN specifically for

billing purposes from EMC. Even Hutch made large purchases of EMC SAN boxes like

Clariion and Symmetrix. Network Appliances, whose business USP has been

primarily based on convergence of NAS and SAN through their iSCSI technology,

had the biggest implementation in the country, a 45 TB rollout, in Texas

Instruments India, who has been primarily catering to the global telecom OEMs

like Motorola, Ericsson and Siemens. IBM has been particularly active with both

its SAN and even NAS implementation especially amongst the ITeS and the call

center community. Big Blue has been striving hard to demystify two popular myths

about SAN–they are expensive and extremely complex to implement. IBM’s ‘SAN

made Simple’ offering was priced during the year at Rs 9.3 lakh and can be

implemented in four days.

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For most telecom service providers, SAN implementation during

the year involved installing a fiber channel switch, connecting some primary

fiber channel storage and backup devices to it and connecting the servers to the

SAN with fiber channel adapters.

How was this more advantageous for telcos than simply adding

more disks to the servers? Explains Alok Kumar, Director-IT, Tata Teleservices,

"SAN provides plug-and-play scalability as well as high performance. And

since storage for telcos needs growing, one can just add more arrays to the SAN

and match them with more backup capacity. A telco could never lose performance

or sacrifice utilization numbers with a SAN in place."

For most telecom enterprise applications running SAN storage,

there has hardly been any complaint in terms of reliability and performance.

Also, according to Shailesh Agarwal, country manager, storage solutions, IBM

India, "SANs also lend themselves to redundant configurations for business

continuity. Running on an independent high-speed network, storage devices can be

mirrored and backed up all at very high speeds. Fiber Channel media also allows

long distance runs, making it possible to have off-site redundant setups as

well. Unlike NAS devices, SAN storage is accessible on the block-level by users

of the SAN, via fiber channel."

With SAN being established to be the most widespread

technology to be implemented by telcos during the year, it begs the question

what next. Kumar attempts to draw a roadmap for SAN especially in the context of

telcos. With fiber channel proving to be expensive, there is an increasing

possibility of IP SANs hogging the limelight in the telecom space. Though fiber

channel SANs would continue to be the best option for pure performance, IP SANs

would supersede them in a multitude of applications that are not so

mission-critical. Heterogeneous connectivity and convergence with NAS would

become increasingly crucial resulting in more adoption of technologies like

iSCSI. Disks would get bigger and faster, channel technologies would explode,

and switches would accommodate these technologies by getting bigger in the

process.

Rajneesh De

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