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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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.
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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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.
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-Ã -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.
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.
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