SAS Superguide: Storage Surge

The phenomenal growth of the storage market during 2005-06 manifests the fact
that enterprises have started taking storage as an important part of their IT
infrastructure. During this period, all storage segments including network
storage, secondary storage like tape systems, and storage software grew
significantly. However, it's believed that most of the buying has happened in
the large user organizations through big storage vendors. However, small and
medium enterprise (SME) sector is also showing potential, as SMEs are fast
embracing advanced technology systems to streamline their business processes.

It's expected that now vendors will strengthen their sales channels to
target small businesses across the country. The impetus will come from the
growth that they've witnessed in the whole storage market. And now the drop in
growth for direct attached storage (DAS) shows that the user community is moving
from DAS to more efficient network storage, including NAS and SAN.

Networked Strides

The external storage market grew in revenues with a phenomenal 85% growth in
the networked-storage category. The SAN market registered 90% growth to reach Rs
449 crore. Likewise, NAS revenues saw 68% jump. With the increasing acceptance
of NAS and SAN, DAS is gradually being phased out, though it collected Rs
208-crore revenue in FY 2005-06 with a fall of 18%. The trend will be witnessed
in the small and medium businesses also, as they are realizing the utility of
network storage and are likely to replace DAS systems with NAS, SAN, or their
combination.

On the network storage front, the users have another option in the form of
Fiber Channel (FC) SAN. It's estimated that over 90% of the SAN deployments
are happening with the fiber channel. Though currently the major buyers are in
large enterprise segments such as banks and telecom service providers, FC SAN is
slowly entering the smaller organizations because of their favorable
price-performance promise.  While 1
Gbps and 2 Gbps FC SANs were prevailing in the market, 4 Gbps category that
doubles the speed is also emerging slowly. The latter will soon get more
acceptance, as the price gap between the 4 Gbps and 2 Gbps is shrinking. So this
should be a reason to rejoice for the SMB users.

Currently, IP SAN is extremely popular with SMBs because of the utility of
IP-based networks. IP SANs also help enterprises protect their investments, as
they can run on companies' existing LANs and hardware. It's also economical
to set up IP SANs, as they eliminate the cost of host-bus adapter and
management. However, IP SAN or any other form of network storage is taking time
to take off in the SME sector, which is evident from the revenue of the IP SAN
market that stood at just Rs 20 crore in FY 2005-06.

But their utility will soon spur the market. IP SANs, for example, are
proving to be useful for departmental applications spread across branches and
offices of an enterprise. Today, IP SANs are being considered as a natural
migration option for enterprises that have been using DAS systems traditionally.

Growth Factors

Most SMEs are increasingly automating their business processes including
mission-critical ones. And as they aspire to expand their business operations
globally, they need to deploy robust storage systems. Plus, the need for
Compliance conformation is forcing them to improve their storage infrastructure.
The need to store information for long periods of time and then retrieve
it at a short notice, while adhering to regulations gave an impetus to
compliance in the storage market. Almost all major storage vendors are
aggressive in this market, as it holds enormous potential. Many Indian companies
with business dealings in the US have planned to comply with international
standards like the Sarbanes Oxley Act, Basel II, etc. This compliance will also
give them a competitive advantage in the global markets including the USA.
Targeting this emerging demand, major storage vendors such as IBM, Sun, NetApp,
EMC, and HP have formulated specific strategies.

Enterprise content management has also become an imperative for enterprises,
as the volume of business data is growing exponentially. This is also because
most enterprises are increasingly expanding their operations through the
e-channels. The storage requirements are thus increasing proportionately to
preserve structured as well as unstructured business-critical information.
Traditionally, the business information that is mostly in the structured form is
stored using database management software. However, enterprises need more
advanced storage systems and workable storage policies because now the amount of
unstructured information is continuously increasing. It's estimated that today
nearly 80% of enterprise information is unstructured, which needs to be managed.

So content management coupled with the compliance factors is driving growth
for storage gear. User companies also need highly reliable and secure storage
systems because of the business-critical nature of the information.

Emerging Trends

To preserve all this business data, corporates have realized that it's not
only the storage boxes that matter. Rather, they need to use advanced techniques
and policies to exploit the full potential of storage technology. Storage
virtualization, for example, helps organizations make optimum use of their
storage resources. While virtualization enables consolidation, storage pooling,
data migration, and replication are some of the virtualization technologies
commonly used in SAN systems.  Storage
virtualization allows enterprises to easily deploy tiers of storage based on
specific application requirements for performance, capacity, and
cost-effectiveness. Enterprises can save storage costs by increasing the
utilization of their storage disks.

Similarly, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) helps users categorize
information depending on the value of data. Then they can identify the storage
systems — economical to advanced — to store that information spread over
different tiers. While ILM is based on storage policies, processes, and systems,
it takes care of the information from the time of its creation to disposal.

With the increasing complexity of storage infrastructure, vendors are
offering consulting services to user enterprises to simplify the storage
management tasks. These services include the study of storage requirements,
information classification, selection of storage systems, information
management, and so on. So user organizations have the option to hire the
services of storage vendors that could provide even end-to-end storage
management services.