‘Consolidation? Sure, but not Now'

While most enterprise CIOs agree that consolidation could

resolve many of their storage worries, they aren’t prepared to go ahead with

this just yet. Cost concerns, legacy issues and lack of adequate services are

some of the problems that are coming in the way

Managing downtime, ensuring business continuity, disaster

recovery and data security… As the volume of data in Indian enterprises grows,

it brings along a number of challenges that the CIO has to track on a day-to-day

basis. The myth that storage is a problem restricted only to large organizations

is fast disappearing. With increasing business needs, even small- and

medium-sized organizations have started looking at management and data storage

more seriously. IS managers are looking at ways and means to optimally utilize

available storage space, and creating models that will meet their storage

requirements. While consolidation of storage is being seen as a solution to such

problems, CIOs are not sure whether the costs can be easily justified. Apart

from budget constraints, dealing with legacy systems, incomplete knowledge,

support from vendors and criticality of data are some other issues that have to

be dealt with. Unless organizations see consolidation as a valuable proposition,

they may not want to discard existing systems and go in for a new and different

option. While most CIOs agree on the benefits of consolidation, they may still

not want to go for it at this stage. The ifs and buts, the problems and benefits

of storage consolidation were some of the issues discussed at the first episode

of Dataquest CIO Series 2002, in New Delhi. The discussion was moderated by

Dataquest group editor Prasanto K Roy and the special panel comprised of IT

heads from various industry segments, including Pradeep Gupta (Daewoo Motors),

Avinash Surma (DSE), Alok Biswas (Seagram), Sandeep Parikh (Perfetti), Ashok

Agarwal (HECL), Sunil Kapoor (Fortis Healthcare), Mudit Agarwal (Dominos) and

Hilal Isar Khan (Honda Siel). Avijit Basu (HP) and PK Gupta (Legato Systems)

participated as industry experts

DAS model still dominates



Avinash Surma (DSE): The issue of data storage is of prime concern to us.
At present, we are using direct attached storage (DAS). Our servers are located

in one room and we need to look after them well. We are quite aware of disaster

recovery issues and the significance of moving storage and data away from us.

Pradeep Gupta (Daewoo): We are a bit primitive when it comes to

storage solutions. We have DAT (Direct Attached Storage) drives, which get

activated at night and the database is dumped on them. Most storage is direct

attached. As a policy, the end-user is responsible for maintaining a back up of

his data. At Daewoo, storage is not a very critical issue. I think storage is

more critical for service-oriented organizations.

Mudit Agarwal (Dominos): The nature of our business is such that we

have to interact with several customers during the day and we are spread across

various locations across the country. Hence, the system that we use is based on

distributed computing and distributed storage. At a particular outlet, we have a

store, where you would find a small LAN and a set of 5-6 PCs, which are used for

the entire workflow management of that store. To that extent, the data is

decentralized and storage is decentralized. However, the responsibility of

maintaining the backups and ensuring restoration is again dual. While the IT

department provides the requisite tools and facilities, the actual job is the

user’s responsibility.

Alok Biswas (Seagram): At Seagram, we have deployed servers primarily

for centralizing data to take backup. Looking at it from the business-continuity

point of view, I do not see any organization getting out of this mode. So,

decentralization is not a proposition. Hard disk based storage still seems

financially acceptable to our organization as compared to a storage area

network. I do not see our data growing to the extent it does in service

companies.

Downtime: A primary concern



Avijit Basu (HP): We are seeing a lot of concern with respect to storage
and this is irrespective of the size of the organization. There is a perception

that enterprise storage and implementation happens only in large organizations

mainly in segments like banking and finance. But I am happy to find that there

is a lot of demand in small and medium enterprises. With increasing business

needs, they have also started looking at storage more seriously.

DSE: Given the critical nature of online transactions, we have to have

a response time of not more than two seconds. We also have an online

surveillance mechanism, which is stipulated by SEBI. This makes our job even

more challenging because if any downtime does occur, we have to give an

explanation to SEBI right away.

Sunil Kapoor (Fortis Healthcare): DSE needs two seconds of response

time to do business because somebody could lose money or gain money in that

time. In a service industry like healthcare, those two seconds could also be

critical. Information needs to be available on a continuous basis. Storage is

basically driven on basis of usage and its criticality. Being a new project and

in the field of healthcare, the criticality of systems is even more important

for us.

Managing critical data



Sandeep Parikh (Perfetti): We have a clear and well-defined storage
policy where I know what I want to store. We are clear that only critical data

goes online and gets backed up. This data would mean some important files,

crucial pricing information, and our ERP data. We store a lot of marketing

information pertaining to Perfetti and its competitors. For an FMCG company like

ours this information very critical in launching any product. So whether we go

for a SAN or NAS solution or not, at least backups are very essential for us.

Within our limited budget, if we can have a good disaster recovery system in

place, I think that that is good enough for us.

Fortis: I think we should not limit ourselves to the backup situation

and consider the criticality of the data for being available to the user on a

continuous basis.

DSE: The 9.11 situation does wake you up from a situation of

complacency where we have been dependent on centralized storage. But the tough

economic scenario has also created constraints. Although many organizations

realize the importance of disaster recovery, they are not willing to invest now.

Ashok Agarwal (HECL): Managing data is a huge responsibility for the

service provider. HECL has about 53 servers in the data center, 22 are HECL

machines, and 31 are customer machines. The total storage capacity is 1.5TB disk

space and across these servers the total utilization is 650 GB, which means 40%

utilization. Being in a distributed environment, one is not able to utilize the

disk space properly. One needs to go in for consolidation of servers, which

could save cost for a service provider. Secondly, manageability of storage also

becomes easier.

Towards consolidation: The challenges



PK Gupta (Legato): Awareness with respect to storage in India is still
very low. People still think that backup could be done on a floppy and with low

manpower. But besides data protection, application protection is also very

important. All this has to be taken into consideration while consolidating.

Server, storage, and application consolidation — these three things have to go

together.

HECL: We are still trying to work out the economics of going in for

consolidation. It is like outsourcing your storage management, not to an

external party but to your storage system. Features like automatic backup,

dynamic configuration and caching makes it useful. But then the question of

budgets and justification of costs is also important.

Daewoo: We have different servers for all enterprise applications such

as messaging, web-based applications etc. We would like to go for consolidation,

but the challenge is that platforms are different and I don’t think that it is

technically feasible to get these under one platform. As far central

applications are concerned, I think every organization is taking adequate steps.

However, utilizing dispersed user data scattered across various machines and

safeguarding it against any loss is big challenge.

Dominos: In an ideal scenario, nobody would say ‘no’ to

consolidated storage. If anybody had abundant resources they would say,

"Yes, I need it". As IS managers, we all know that it would be easy to

manage that set-up. But the challenges come in managing the resources available

and hence the approach of mix and match. From my experience I feel one should

try and consolidate data that is more application oriented. User’s data can

still reside on his machine. I don’t think organizations would even try to

keep that on a central location.

Vendor woes



Seagram: The issue is not just about storage, but maintaining business

continuity. There is an issue of addressing the gap and there is no service

provider who can deal with this issue in a comprehensive manner. It is very easy

to give a product based solution, but when it comes to service, the service

provider has to give a very clear SLA. The vendors and service providers have to

come up with a clear service basket that addresses the issues at a reasonable

cost.

Hilal Isar Khan (Honda Siel): I would love to have a solution where

both HP and Legato would work together, where they would provide a software

solution to map all the dispersed devices and come up with a storage solution

for the same.

Perfetti: Vendors really need to act as consultants. You have to tell

me whether what I have deployed so far is worth the effort and the pain in terms

of money invested. Secondly, how do I make sure as to what I have invested in is

used optimally and it pays back. Thirdly, don’t just come to me and say that

just revamp everything and put in something new. I might put in that money and

actually end up getting nothing out of it. I have tried telling many vendors

that if you reduce the cost for us today, whatever money we save this year is

your money. For us, it would be very simple, as I would end up saving that

amount. In fact I had spoken to a lot of senior people from Xerox or even HP and

other vendors but no one was willing to come back to us. This means that there

is no comfort or confidence at their end itself.

Fortis: We have gone through a procurement process and implemented a

SAN a year ago. In my experience with the storage industry I have learnt that

the knowledge within the suppliers is still lacking. What has come about is that

no two parties talk to each other. Nowhere in the in the last 6 months have I

seen in the industry, a conscious effort to address that because are we going

nowhere in terms of ROI and solutions offered. Besides installing hardware, the

vendor should also install databases, run it for at least 60 days and check

thoroughly for any redundancy.

Benefits of consolidation



HP: Consolidation essentially involves a redesigning and reassessment of

your storage requirements. Very low-end consolidation such as disaster

management would mean changing the backup mechanism. An organization could go in

for automated backup instead of having 5-6 DATs. As far as a disk environment

goes, one need not look at a SAN/NAS solution, you could go for an external box

that caters to 5-7 servers together. So, instead of having individual boxes, one

could look at centralized, consolidated disk box. This would not need even any

significant expenditure.

Legato: In the storage scenario, hardware is only 20% of the cost. The

remaining 80% of the cost is that of overall management and other things.

Storage consolidation would mean lesser administration and this is a key point.

The other point is that storage consolidation is a step towards storage

virtualization, which is where we are eventually moving. If look at the top 100

companies in India only a few have actually gone in for storage consolidation.

Where as in developed countries, businesses have even moved towards storage

virtualization.

Audience (BHEL): We have different plants and units all over the

country. We have moved in our plants from the distributed mode to the

centralized mode with online applications. Whether we like it or not, storage

has to get consolidated at one place. If we do away with the distributed storage

that we currently provide and instead go in for consolidation at a single place,

a lot of problems would be resolved and the total cost of ownership would also

be much lower.

DATAQUEST Report