Gaining Ground

The migration from direct-attached storage to iSCSI is emerging as one of the
growth markets for the season, primarily driven by first time network storage
deployments among SMBs. The technology is gaining traction as SMB storage
environments gain complexity warranting the need to move to networked storage.

However, the iSCSI market is still awaiting ramp-up and the accelerated
run-up that vendors had expected of it a few years back. According to Sumit
Mukhija, business development manager, Cisco Systems, India and SAARC, “While
overall networked storage adoption has been very high, the iSCSI adoption, in
particular, has been a bit on the slower side.”

With a large legacy presence in the data center segment, and being the de
facto choice for mission critical applications, FC SAN will continue to be the
dominating protocol of choice for SANs. According to industry experts, even
while the momentum has started picking up in the last one year and will further
accelerate with the growing number of iSCSI implementations, the technology is
not going to replace Fibre Channel SANs (FC SAN) any time soon. The odds
continue to be highly skewed in favor of the traditional fibre at least for the
next 2-3 years.

However, with the ability to afford cost-effective and affordable SAN, iSCSI
is lowering the entry level barrier for storage consolidation and opening up the
floodgates of networked storage for SMBs. Spurring in its wake, a whole new
trend of mainline proliferation of networked storage among the cost conscious
small and medium enterprises.

Welcoming Party: (L-R) Ravi Srinivasan, co-founder and senior VP, Client & Technology Solutions, OfficeTiger; Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India & SAARC; Soumitra Agarwal, director, Marketing, NetApp; Vasan, co-founder of Sanat Technologies

Market Facts

According to industry experts, iSCSI SANs will proliferate the market in
2006 and beyond. As per IDC, the worldwide iSCSI market will more than double
this year, reaching $842 mn, up from $314.1 mn in 2005. Expected to surpass the
$1 bn mark in 2007.

According to IDC, in India, the IP SAN market stood at $4.54 mn in 2005, a
growth of almost 200% over the previous year. According to Manoj Chugh,
president, EMC India & SAARC, the adoption rate has picked up considerably
over the last two years and is bound to grow in the coming years. “It has
grown from being a connectivity tool to a niche in itself,” he adds.

Vasan, co-founder of Sanat Technologies, explains that in the technology
adoption curve, iSCSI is in a place where the market is getting educated about
the technology, and is curious to know more and adopt.

Storage vendors are gung ho about the Indian iSCSI market opportunity,
foreseeing faster growth rates as compared to the other markets worldwide.
“Part of the reason is that there is a huge market in India that will deploy
networked storage for the first time and can straightaway migrate from Direct
Attached to iSCSI, without having to necessarily consider FC SAN,” says
Soumitra Agarwal, director, Marketing, NetApp.

Markets, New and Now

Considering its inherent cost advantage, SMB forms the core of the iSCSI
market opportunity in India. According to Mukhija, early adopters of iSCSI
include the SMBs and the IT/ITeS verticals, and will continue to be the mainstay
market in the foreseeable future. “The SMBs are beginning to require
block-level access. Hence, they will ultimately need a solution, which will be
able to address issue, which NAS could not and for which fibre channel is too
expensive,” he elaborates.

While iSCSI will not replace fibre channel in large enterprises, it will
compliment it by catering to specific requirements. While large enterprises who
have already invested in FC SAN may not be do a forklift migration to IP SAN,
they will certainly be looking at it for newer applications, or for moving some
existing ones.

Sometimes, it is not viable for an enterprise to invest in fiber channel
connectivity for all servers. Here, iSCSI provides cost-effective connectivity
for additional servers.

According to Agarwal, for enterprises, which have already deployed NFS or
CIFS, and are looking to add block-based access for certain applications, iSCSI
is a logical choice. And for those enterprises, who have already deployed FC SAN
at the core of the data centre, iSCSI forms an attractive choice for SAN
expansion or for deployment at regions or departments.

In terms of applications, some iSCSI deployment sweetspots in an enterprise
are: remote access, DR, midrange enterprise applications, mid-to-small sized
data centres, development/test/Q&A environments, and compute grids (where
boot-from-SAN is a requirement).

With all these trends to look out for in iSCSI technology over the next
couple of years, one will begin to see a lot of performance-intensive
applications also making use of the iSCSI protocol. There is expected to be a
faster pace of iSCSI adoption even among large enterprises.

Market Drivers

The low cost of setting up an iSCSI network as compared to setting an FC SAN
as well as the low TCO for both the basic installation and for subsequent
maintenance, makes iSCSI adoption compelling. IP-based storage has attained
increased prominence, because of the cost factor as it helps in total network
storage consolidation of storage resources at a lower cost and centralizes the
storage architecture.

According to Arindam Bose, head, IT, LG Electronics India, iSCSI offers the
compelling benefits of consolidation, while leveraging the ease of use and low
cost of IP network. This low cost is partly fuelled by organizations leveraging
on their existing IP backbone investment for implementing iSCSI as compared to
making fresh investments on FC, explains Vasan.

Furthermore, as Chugh points out, it also helps in leveraging existing
investments in FC SAN and in the case of NAS helps in extending NAS
consolidation capabilities to include traditional block applications.

Another key driver for IP SAN is the ability to overcome the limitations of
distance. It helps centralize the storage infrastructure and provides total
consolidation to the storage infrastructure by connecting stranded servers.
Traditional SAN is limited by distance but IP SAN can help overcome that
limitation by connecting geographically distributed servers/networks.

Among emerging growth drivers for the Indian market over the coming years is
the emergence of global SAN. According to Ravi Srinivasan, co-founder and senior
VP, Client & Technology Solutions, OfficeTiger, locations in India are
increasingly being viewed as part of a global network for many companies.
Thereby, global SAN will become important, and iSCSI will be an effective way
for global organizations to allow easy access to data transfers from around the
globe. The growth of global companies' India operations will typically be the
biggest driver. “Many large companies worldwide already have Fibre Channel
implementations, but for India operations that have stranded high performance
servers, or for remote offices to access central data centre SANs that may be in
North America and Europe, iSCSI can and will be used,” he explains further.

With more and more vendors coming out with iSCSI based offerings,
availability of native iSCSI drivers for other OS apart from Windows and new
innovations around the iSCSI technology, the market will receive further spurt,
driving a faster pace of growth over the next 2-3 years.

Over the next few years even as iSCSI overcomes some of its critical
limitations and becomes more robust with the constant innovations and
enhancements taking place around the technology, it will continue to act
complimentary to traditional fibre channel SAN rather than replace it. 

Shipra Arora

shipraa@cybermedia.co.in