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Ode to Network Storage

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DQI Bureau
New Update

A few years ago, storage was all about the space in the computer’s spindle

drives or storing the important data in the backup devices such as MO drives or

Zip drives. The inflection point in the storage industry has happened and now it

is all about consolidated storage solutions for the complete enterprise. The

buzzwords are NAS, SAN, FAS, and disaster recovery. Globally, storage has grown

leaps and bounds partially due to the 9/11 incident and also the recent mishaps

in the global business community. The WorldCom and Enron fiasco has made

database management the need of the hour.

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Emerging Trends

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SAN and NAS to see very high growth. Gartner says SAN will account for 49% and NAS for 32% of storage revenue pie in India by 2005. 

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According to IDC, need for storage will triple by 2003. 

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Disaster Recovery will become a major margin grosser.

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Government regulations might drive the storage requirement manifold.

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Storage consultancy market to witness massive growth. 

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Backup devices and hot swappable devices might also seek a major pie in the storage market.

Storage has been maturing significantly in India too, though the inflection

point is yet to happen. Indian storage requirement is still driven by the backup

devices such as tape drives and RAID etc. The enterprise storage is limited to

DAS (Direct Attached Storage) but bigger companies, especially banks, data

critical companies, insurance sector and IDCs are considering NAS and SAN

solutions. Gartner estimates that SAN will account for 49 % and NAS for 32 % of

the storage revenue pie in India by 2005. "SAN and NAS are growing at

roughly 80 % year-on-year," said Anal K Jain, MD (India and SAARC),

NetworkAppliance.

SAN infrastructure supports server clustering or multi-server data access for

databases and transaction systems. It is also being used for LAN-free backups.

SAN solutions can be deployed starting from data of 1 TB onwards with 10

servers.

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The emerging trends are fueling the storage industry tremendously but the

maturity level in India is far fetched. "The Indian market is in the early

stages and to attain the maturity level it will take at least two years",

said David N Nair,         Country

Manager, Adaptec. Internet connectivity would be the key to the data transfers

as per Nair. "iSCSI is the latest technology, where the data transfer is

high and the flexibility in implementing them is also high. The redundancy

factor would also be low, thus this might just revolutionize the storage

hierarchy," he added.

PK Gupta, Strategic Affairs (Intercontinental), Legato Systems said that

storage requirements would see a sudden bulge once the government passes a

ruling on the content management front. E-governance will also bring in a lot of

storage requirements.

"Earlier the network architecture used to govern the storage design but

now it is the other way round. Once the corporates are able to judge the

required content management architecture and decide on the future requirements

then the Indian market will become mature."

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The Demand Drivers

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Processes becoming application oriented: Most of the corporates are data driven and as the soft data becomes data critical, the data and content management will be quintessential. The increased implementation of ERP, CRM, and data warehousing software across enterprises will also chip in to the growing storage market in India. 

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Early adoption of storage technology: Storage needs to be consolidated, which can offer flexible and centrally managed storage. The enterprise storage automation is one of the examples, through which heterogeneous storage environments can be managed on a single platform.

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Technology Awareness: CIOs and CFOs are increasingly adapting new technology and enterprises are willing to spend approximately 40 % of the IT infrastructure spending on storage.

Compliance issues are also driving the storage requirements. SMSs, e-mails,

MMS etc might be required by the Intelligence bureau to be stored. "The

heterogeneous storage environments will also be integrated. The latest in

storage architecture is Enterprise Storage Automation in which any software or

hardware update will happen automatically and thereby nullifying

redundancy," according to Gupta.

The software used for the storage systems plays a key role in enhancing

performance and supporting multiple hardware systems. It provides the end-user

cost benefits and also provides an information infrastructure for businesses,

call centers, service providers, and e-businesses to execute, scale and provide

better services. A lot of OEMs are planning to open up their development centers

in India, which would result in high revenue growth. "NetworkAppliance

works on a margins of 55-60 %, as the software used is customized. Only box

pushing will not yield benefits in this industry," comments Jain when asked

about the percentage profit margins in India.

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The tape based storage market is also growing at a steady pace. Though the

tape-based storage solution is also graduating towards toward automated tape

libraries and Ultrium technology, optimized for high capacity and performance

with high reliability.

Disaster recovery (DR) is also driving the storage market heavily. Lot of

Enterprise Storage Solution (ESS) providers are betting on DR. EMC is betting

high on SRDF (Synchronous Recovery Data Faster). Avijit Basu, marketing manager,

NSSO, HP India, says, "Because of storage consolidation, we see a growth in

the investment on high-end storage infrastructure. These include automated

backups and SAN implementations." "HP is strong in the top and lower

segment storage solutions, but has missed out on the middle segment. Now we have

the required product offerings and the technical expertise, we just have to try

to sustain a viable push in the market through a better profit sharing with our

channel partners," adds Basu.

Yogesh Kamat, Sales Manager, Indian Subcontinent, Maxtor said that the early

high-end storage adopters would be telecom, IT firms, ITeS, banking and

financial organizations. Vendors are investing heavily on educating the

end-users and even users have started thinking seriously about secondary

storage. The drivers for the growth are the data-intensive applications needed

on a 24X7 basis–like e-mail, ERP, CRM and similar others. The decreasing cost

of storage is also driving the storage market. Also, the Network Storage

(NAS/SAN) is also gaining gradual acceptance vis-à-vis standalone storage.

"I feel the Indian market might witness a double-digit growth primarily

driven by high capacity drives like DLT, LTO, SDLT etc and automation", he

added.

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Talking about the storage scenario, he felt that in the past two years,

awareness regarding IT storage solutions had increased greatly in India.

Corporations understand the importance of data management and have been

increasing their IT investments in implementing storage solutions. However, it

is in the early to medium term stages and there is a long road ahead for

high-end storage solutions.

"Recently we announced a whole new range of drives for the enterprise

segment–the MaXLine range and Atlas 15K. MaXLine is the newest generation of

ATA drives designed specifically for rapidly emerging enterprise storage

applications including near-line, media storage and network storage. The MaXLine

family features two critical differentiators: huge capacities up to 320 GB for

corporate archiving and media recording; and unique manufacturing and quality

for 24/7 operations with mean time to failure (MTTF) rates exceeding one million

hours. By adding a layer of MaXLine drives to archive architectures, companies

can instantly recover time-critical data including executive e-mail, transaction

data and accounting data that may need to be recovered on demand. Maxtor Atlas

15K is an enterprise-class 15,000-RPM hard drive.

Atlas 15K features Maxtor’s second-generation Ultra320 SCSI interface and

MaxAdapt, an intelligent technology that delivers the highest system performance

possible," claims Kamat.

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Talking about the future of storage, he said "Serial ATA (SATA) will

most likely become the standard interface replacing Parallel ATA. The transition

will probably occur over the next two years. SATA benefits include faster data

rate at 150MB/sec, bandwidth with point-to-point architecture, reliability as

the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) improves accuracy of transmitted data and

easier integration with smaller cables and improved routability. The general

market interplay scenario is that the lines between desktop and enterprise

markets are blurring. As a result, customers will differentiate and evaluate

storage products on a number of different dimensions. With that, the application

of large, efficient capacity desktop drives into classic enterprise environments

is being considered with the key trade-offs being performance, capacity and

cost. Interface has become less of a differentiator. In addition, SATA and SAS

are being designed to be interchangeable."

The emerging trends are predicting a major contribution from the government’s

side, especially the e-governance initiatives.

The total storage requirement is predicted to be nearly 5,700 terabytes by

2005. With the players continuously witnessing decreasing cost per megabyte the

storage solutions might become faster and cheaper.

Shweta Khanna



DQ Week

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