STORAGE: Redesigning Strategy

Over the past few years, large enterprises have invested heavily in storage
resulting in the creation of isolated pools or 'islands' of storage. They
are now looking at consolidation that would allow them better utilization of
capacities, better performance, and ease of management.

Storage has been one premise of IT where the Indian enterprises are willing
to and also spend liberally, but not copiously yet. According to V&D100
estimates the total network storage market in India in FY 2004—05 stood at Rs
430 crore. SAN and NAS contributed Rs 270 crore and Rs 100 crore respectively to
the total. Standalone shipment of network storage software was in the range of
Rs 55 crore.

India is very much at the forefront of new technology introduction and as it
is integrating with the world economy, enterprises in India are becoming early
adopters of global tech trends.

Ever spiraling data volumes, increasing regulatory compliance and the growing
value of data is also driving adoption of concepts like information lifecycle
management (ILM). Typical backup windows are also shrinking, increasing adoption
of technologies like 'virtual tape', that allows emulated magnetic tape
storage on physical magnetic disks. Increasing criticality of data and dynamic
social and business environment is forcing more and more enterprises to deploy
disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. All leading vendors like
EMC, HP, NetApp, Sun, IBM, and HDS recorded high growth figures for their SAN
and NAS offerings.

What's Your Choice?

FC-SANs constitute more than two-thirds of the overall SAN market in India.
While FC SANs thrive, the emergence of IP SANs tilted the scales. IP SAN
deployments across enterprises including SMBs accelerated the move away from DAS-the
traditional storage at enterprises. As IP-SANs use the iSCSI protocol, they
offer SAN like functionality over industry standard TCP/IP and Ethernet. By
carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI facilitated data transfer over
intranet. Therefore, iSCSI was amongst the key technologies that helped SAN
deployments to filter to small and medium enterprises.

There was a kind of stagnated spending in the high-end market segment as most
like the BFSI, Telco, ITeS have already heavily invested in the scalable storage
solutions. More and more spending has been from the mid-tier, which could again
be demarcated as upper and lower mid-tiers.

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, country manager, Intransa, India says, "IP-SAN is
increasingly being preferred as a storage solution of choice by wide variety of
customers across industry verticals including manufacturing, telecom, media, BPO,
Software development, etc." Some of Intransa's IP SAN customers include
Spice Telecom, HCL Technologies, Wipro Spectramind, L&T, Grasim Industries,
Quintilles, Rediff, Sunpharma, etc.

IP-SAN finds favor with telecom companies for disaster recovery and nearline-data
protection. "IP-SANs are entering a new phase and have now become a serious
alternative to FC-SANs," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise
Strategy Group.

SMBs Scouting Actively

SMBs have been actively spending-though conservatively-which according to an
AMI-Partners report, was at Rs 116 crore for DAS and Rs 74 crore on network
storage. Most vendors have revised their products and strategies and customized
them to the burgeoning demands and needs of the Indian SMB market.

For Tom Zack, VP, marketing and operations, Asia-Pacific, Hitachi Data
Systems, the middle tier market is growing at 40 percent and they have to
address the lower mid tier market through products that are low in cost with
high availability and rich functionality. Also for the first time in Sun and HP's
product history-they are selling HDS' mid-tier storage solution.

Almost every vendors has been selling SAN or NAS or a combination of both to
the SMB segment across the industry. HP enjoyed the leadership in the SMB
storage market, and aggressively promoted products and programs focused on this
segment. There was growing competition coming from vendors like EMC, HDS, and
NetApp who also got aggressive in the market. The growth in the SMB segment was
ascribed to growth in the number of users, expanding business network and those
of partners with whom they transact.

Another important aspect was the realization of CRM and its implementation
and increased spending on applications like ERP. Increased levels of security
awareness, and need to create data back up and recovery solutions gave an
impetus to storage. Rahul singh, marketing manager, StorageWorks Division, HP
India opines, "there is a visible trend towards network attached storage
and automated back up in SME. SMEs, in the absence of full-fledged IT
departments, are looking at ease of operations where, for instance, backups are
auto-scheduled and continue to happen in the background, maybe over the weekend.
A sea change from the current-day scenario where people may be running around
all night with tape cartridges."

Evolving Market

Gone are the days when vendors pushed vanilla storage boxes, today the need
is for specialized storage solutions. Earlier server vendors like HP and IBM
used to sell storage boxes with their key offerings. Globally, market players
realized the need for specialization and strategy change. As a result, EMC, the
early bird, led the pack globally with NetApp and HDS also faring pretty well.
However the earlier stalwarts HP, IBM, and SUN did not really strike gold.

As the storage industry in India is shifting from DAS model to a networked
storage model, it is increasing the focus on software and services integrated in
the solutions. EMC is a successful study where it changed its market strategy
from 70 percent hardware and 30 percent software and services in FY 2003—04 to
47 percent hardware and 53 percent software in FY 2004—05. NetApp also
benefited from its two SIs-Wipro and Apara.

Veritas picked up Rs 50 crore-43 percent of the market-through its
various solutions for e-mail archiving, clustering, backup etc.

Storage solution providers today are taking the application-oriented approach
towards IT infrastructure. This approach is more in line with the business
processes of the organizations and ensures that the right solution is put forth
for an enterprise. According to Shuja Mirza, technical consultant-India, Brocade
Communications Systems, "IT infrastructures today are evolving as
competitive tools, rather than just processing power for batch jobs or
electronic storage media pools. This approach aligns the IT plans with the
business objectives of the organization."

Disaster Recovery Augments Storage Needs

Disasters happen all the time and businesses that can best survive are those
that win. To ensure survivability, businesses must have disaster recovery
program and infrastructure in place. Vaidyanathan R Iyer of Intransa says,
"In this day and age of ROI, IT managers must think of the basic and
critical business objectives of a DR program and infrastructure. IP-SAN serves
nearline data protection needs."

Businesses know that controller-based replication is a time-tested solution
for disaster recovery. But what few people understand is the different types of
replication and how it meets their needs.

Many IT organizations today are challenged with moving their online and
nearline data to offline tape backups and archives. The requirement for 24x7
application uptime dramatically shrinks the 'backup window'. Yet the data
volume on the multitude of servers, desktops, and laptops continues to grow at a
rapid rate. While tape arrays and incremental backup solutions help achieve
shorter backup windows, they are often complex and costly both for backup and
restore. Many IT organizations cannot afford such solutions. As a result, much
of the data in many enterprises is not backed up regularly, if at all.

For the data that is backed up, the latency of restoring data from tape is
usually long. If the backup log (i.e. the catalog) is maintained online and the
data maintained in a tape library, restoring the data may take many minutes.
Otherwise, it could take hours, and perhaps days to retrieve the tape from an
offsite vault before data can be restored. Obviously, this takes too long for
most organizations.

To address these challenges, IT departments are now deploying low cost,
cost-effective ATA disk arrays as a staging area, either as a front-end to a
tape library or as a stand-alone appliance on the network.

This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts and effectively
eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables the backup servers and the
associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further cost savings. In a
similar vein, the StorControl facilitates the backup of desktop/laptop user
data, addressing one of the most significant challenges for today's enterprise
IT organizations.

Majority of Indian Companies are looking at building DR capabilities by
utilizing their existing Ethernet infrastructure and already available IP skill
sets of their IT technicians.

Minu Sirsalewala

CIOs' Views on Storage

Zoeb Adenwala, chief IT, Pidilite Industries

• Storage requirements: Pidilite is an extensive user of ERP, and
  SCM type of applications. With increase in the business applications,
  e-mail, etc the storage requirements have increased over last two to three
  years with: business expansion, legal and statutory requirements. Along with
  high numbers of new applications, storage needs have been increasing at 10—15
  percent per year.

• Storage architecture: As most other organizations,
  we were traditionally on DAS. As a manufacturing major, ERP is
  business-critical for us and DR is necessary for survival in the near and
  long run. So it's important to have a networked storage solution in place,
  as it provides reliable high performance, and gives us better control over
  information resources. We have an extensive use of NAS and SAN. We use an
  automated backup solution.

• Best practices: The vendor's credentials are very
  important. We prefer vendors whose core technical competency is storage
  technology. Different vendors have different features that need to be
  matched to one's requirement. A detailed evaluation of the player and its
  offerings is necessary.

• Optimizing storage: With availability of historical data,
  forecasting systems are able to give much more accurate results. Besides
  this, many MIS systems give better understanding of trends that help
  business managers make informed decision. BI has become an essential tool in
  today's environment.

Nihar Rao, CIO, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance

• Storage requirements: Our storage needs are
  growing at over 100 percent per year. We not only have to maintain and store
  records for our own references but also abide by regulations and policies.
  With more and more applications being deployed in the organization, the
  storage requirements are constantly multiplying.

• Storage architecture: We still have a traditional
  solution-currently we use DAS-with some exceptions where we use NAS.

• Best practices: Interoperability, expandability,
  and technical support are the key factors to be taken into consideration.
  The storage system needs to be adequately scalable to handle the increasing
  data volumes. The resilience of the storage solution is also very important
  because it should be able to respond dynamically to the changing business
  scenario. Thus interoperability precedes most factors.

• Cost: The solution should be cost effective in
  terms of capital and operating costs. Its total cost of ownership should be
  minimum. The technology and the solution should be reliable and supplied by
  a vendor that has a strong market presence and support system in place.

• Storage trends in the insurance industry: In life
  insurance, there is substantial use of imaging technology with long-term
  storage of large-volume, client records. SANs are used widely.

Trends and Opportunities

Information storage and management has seen double digit
growth over the last 2-3 years because of the following trends and
opportunities:

• Information explosion - The top five factors
  driving the need for increased storage capacity are: email, business growth,
  increased files sizes and new employees. Unstructured information is growing
  at almost 100 percent a year.

• Increased demand by SMEs - Information and
  application boom is happening not only within large organizations but is
  growing faster in mid and small businesses. In India, SMEs have emerged as a
  key vertical for storage solutions and services market. There are approx.
  46,000 SMEs in India and all of them are looking to increase their spend on
  IT and especially storage.

• Regulatory compliance - Growth for enterprise
  storage has been triggered by regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA,
  Basel II, and RBI and SEBI Guidelines which mandates companies to store data
  for a few years.  

• Enterprise applications - CRM have also been
  driving growth in a big way apart form other e-commerce applications.