DQ CIO Series: Tend to My Data…

Data storage has been a fast-growing area on the services front. The 9.11
attack only increased the concern about data security and storage. The
Dataquest-HP CIO panel discussion held in Bangalore focussed on the size of the
storage market in India and debated on how convinced companies were about
outsourcing their storage needs. The meet focussed on the storage problems CIOs
face, including issues related to management of services by storage service
providers. The panelists at the meet were Exocore Consulting CTO Atul Chitnis,
Tyco Electronics senior manager Sanjay Handu, Storage Tek general manager Vijay
Pradhan, Sun Microsystems director (systems engineering) Anil Valluri, EMC
regional director Ajay Desai, HP business manager (storage products) Owais Khan,
ITI additional GM (IS and IT) Mukt Behari, HP business development manager
Avijit Basu and Bangalore Labs CEO Joy Nandy. The discussion was moderated by
Dataquest Group Editor Prasanto Kumar Roy. Excerpts:

Atul Chitnis CTO, Excore Consulting “Organizations need data to look at to figure out productivity trends. Business needs come with differing value propositions”

How large is the storage market in India?


Atul Chitnis (Exocore): People have not been taking storage seriously.
Management of storage usually is assigned a small role. A lot of people have
started looking at alternatives beyond getting a bigger hard disk or more
servers. They are looking at intelligently storing data across the place and
sending data offsite.

Anil Valluri Director (systems engineering), Sun Microsystems “Mid-sized organizations are today seriously opting for disaster recovery and data archiving solutions”

Anil Valluri (Sun): Storage is a very big business for Sun in India as nearly
40% of its revenues come from this segment. We’ve started offering
multi-vendor storage that can be attached to any server. Today, people are
looking at storage independently and we see a huge shift in the market from our
enterprise customers. People who have looked at storage as a mere attachment to
the server are looking at it today as a very strategic investment. They are
considering a lot of options in terms of the shelf life, the longevity of the
product, the heterogeneous capability of the product, its reliability and so on.

Vijay Pradhan general manager, Storage Tek “It is not that Indian firms don’t understand disaster recovery. It is only that everyone believes that his firm is not vulnerable”

Vijay Pradhan (Storage Tek): I think we have come a long way in terms of
focusing on data protection, maintaining backups and looking at this as a very
critical element of the entire infrastructure. Another emerging area is the
archival of information.

As customer storage grows, the amount of investment on storage will increase.
But when archival is done, the cost of storage comes down while running a mix of
hierarchy storage. As far as offsite storage utility is concerned, I think it’s
still far away.

Owais Khan business manager, HP “...It depends on how you conduct business and what gives you better RoI. For some, storage is critical. For others, it is not”

Owais Khan (HP): Storage is just developing as a technology in the market and
more people are looking at more advanced ways of doing storage. In the record
storage segment, SAN and NAS are really coming up and we see business and the
technology providing some kind of storage utility for users.

Ajay Desai (EMC): Our stint in India has definitely been an uphill task. But
with changes in the market place, customers are starting to look at storage more
closely. We have tried to educate customers that storage is not just about
application but an asset that an organization has. Now in India, we help them
look at centralized storage, its management and services. Consolidation is the
first stage after which software and management of information stored becomes
critical.

Joy Nandy CEO, Bangalore Labs  “Organizations still need to focus on storage as a concept for processes before they decide on what technology will help them”

New breed of service providers

Joy Nandy (Bangalore Labs):
Data storage has been a fast-growing area on the
services front. The 9/11 attack only increased the concern about data security
and storage. The Dataquest-HP CIO panel discussion held in Bangalore focussed on
the size of the storage market in India and how convinced are companies about
outsourcing their data storage needs. The panel discussion focused on the
storage problems of CIOs including issues related to management of services by
storage service providers. The panelists at the meet were Atul Chitnis, CTO,
Excore Consulting, Sanjay Handu, senior manager, Tyco Electronics, Vijay Pradhan,
general manager, Storage Tek, Anil Valluri, director (systems engineering), Sun
Microsystems, Ajay Desai, regional director, EMC, Owais Khan, business manager
(storage products), HP; Mukt Behari, additional GM (IS and IT),ITI; Avijit Basu,
business development manager, HP and Joy Nandy, CEO, Bangalore Labs. Excerpts
from the discussion… The storage service providers are turning storage into
utility.These providers are relatively new in India where off shoring storage is
not the best way possible as organizations still have a high degree of control
on their data and security concerns are a major issue.

It is far too early now for storage service providers find their way in
India. Organizations still need to focus on storage as a concept for processes
before they decide on what technologies will help them.

Avijit Basu (HP): One of the constraints for going into enterprise storage is
in balancing business concerns and returns on costs. Customers want hassle-free
storage installation and the entire project taken care of. CIOs in enterprises
are realizing today that it is easier to give it to somebody and focus on
business needs and concerns. So that I think would be the future way of looking
at enterprise storage.

Mukt Behari additional GM, ITI “When it comes to outsourcing, the return on investment becomes an issue with the management in some instances”

Selling managed services


Mukt Bihari (ITI): We do want to move into offsite storage having a central
storage facility. This is mainly because of the complexity involved in storage
and continuous training of the IT-staff on every technology provided by a
particular vendor.

Also, despite a VSAT network, the bandwidth is poor so our MIS gets congested
and taking backup at a central remote site is not imaginable. On the other hand
however, when it comes to outsourcing, the return on investment becomes an
issue. As a CIO, I don’t encourage too much expenditure on common storage. And
so in my company we are not thinking beyond in-house plant storage (at a
different location) and managing that.

Prasanto Kumar Roy group editor, Dataquest “Manufacturing units feel that their investment can be based on the cost of failure analysis, which it is not all that high”

Prasanto K Roy (Dataquest): The manufacturing sector feels that its
investment can be based on the cost of failure analysis, which it is not high.
But in comparison, for the financial services sector, there is a critical need
for secured storing.

EMC: When you look at the manufacturing segment from the storage perspective,
there are multiple departments within the organization. So, you really have to
justify storage from an ROI perspective. In manufacturing, it’s not just CRP
or MRP, it’s your design department and the PDM environment, which you want to
integrate. So from an infrastructure service provider and consulting, we need to
look at storage as a means of adding value to the organization.

Centrally managed solutions- good idea?

Exocore: Just a week ago the entire UK’s airport system went dead because of
storage failure. The reason was that the whole computing set-up rested on the
central storage system, which went dead. So whether this is an indicator of
whether centrally managed storage is a good idea or not is still up for debate.

Bangalore Labs: Storage is more of a business decision than a technology
decision. Becoming dependent on computing has its pros and cons. Today if there
are business benefits from centralization, then you have a number to play with.
Costs are lessened and productivity is increased in terms of revenues.

Storage Tek: The airport failure case is a situation of system design failure
rather than technology. In operational systems like airports, the ties between
computing, scheduling and operations need to be closed. It is not about disaster
recovery in a few hours but about surviving the disaster.

Ajay Desai regional director, EMC “We have tried to educate clients that storage is not just about the applications they run, but an asset that their organization has”

EMC: Failures will happen. Two points need to be considered. First is the
recovery time objective that would determine the kind of infrastructure and
process that one needs to deploy. The second is the recovery point objective
that would define the processes, the infrastructure and technology one would
need to choose.

Outsourcing data: still new in India

Dataquest:
The centralized approach guarantees 99.99% availability but for
ten sites, the costs are extremely high. On the other hand if a storage service
provider guarantees 99.999%, a high SLA and penalty clauses, then possibly there
can be considerations here.

Exocore: If data is valuable then there really is no more choice in terms of
whether you should migrate or should not migrate. Today for India, outsourcing
is only a concept because of the genetic nature in which Indian businesses have
grown. But a lot of organizations need archived data to look into the trends of
productivity and therefore business needs of storing come with differing value
propositions. All we do today is just articulate to vendors and consultants the
need for storage, consolidation, archive, backup, retrieval and the import of
data to your business. People are reluctant to entrust data to an offsite
storage infrastructure that has low reliability. This is not so in the US and in
Europe, where infrastructure is very reliable.

Giving away data still risky

Tyco Electronics:
The focus is very clearly on business. One is constantly
looking for ways to get higher performance at lower cost. I think that the
mindset has to change and people need to get comfortable with third party
handling of their data.

Avijit Basu marketing manager (NSSO), HP “CIOs today are realizing that it is better to go ahead and outsource storage and focus on their business needs”

HP: Customers or organizations will look at outsourcing with respect to
business and mission criticality. Some will outsource and some will not. In
India the management and control of the data is still with the organization so
that they get an assurance that the data, which is being given outside, is
protected.

Mid-sized in-house storage and archival


Bangalore Labs: Storage service providers independent of the organization cannot
be considered in India. It is because of technological as well as control and
security issues. As the management will not want to outsource, one has in-house
data centers and would employ an outside team with skills to manage them.
Mid-size organizations or start-ups will fall into this frame. Organizations
with a lot of real time transactions will be the first ones to go into external
service providers. The rest of them will still continue to have corporate data
centers to manage most of their storage requirements.

Storage Tek: As storage is technically complex, outsourcing makes sense. With
many hardware and software solutions in the market place, organizations are
looking at automating their backup rather than depending on the human resource
to be able to back it up. I have seen organizations taking advantage of lower
costs of storage using the appropriate media to archive their information and
store it. Archival from an outsourcing standpoint is one area that will really
grow. I think it will also happen in India.

Sun: Low-end businesses are not opting for this service provider model
because of affordability, business practices, and so on. We’ve seen a clear
trend in the mid-size organizations actually seriously opting for disaster
recovery and data archiving. It’s a myth that is it does not have a market in
India. Networks have become extremely affordable and the bandwidth is available
on demand. There is no way small and medium organizations can do it on their own
with the same level of professionalism and expertise, which a service provider
can.

DATAQUEST Report