Storage: Taming the Flood

As we look at FY12, the storage story revolved around ‘Unified Storage'. As a concept, unified storage has been talked about for years, but it hit the terra firma over last year and indeed it has created a taxonomical change in the industry. The network storage industry is composed of NAS and SAN and this getting blurred by unified storage that brings in a whole lot of unique deliverables to the table. The industry is moving towards one unified storage platform and no longer predominantly divided on NAS or SAN lines and it is up to the enterprises to leverage NAS/SAN in one single platform. What is powering the era of unified storage is simplicity, manageability and scalability. "IT organizations in mid-sized and large enterprises are struggling with a deluge of data and increasingly diverse data management needs. They require storage solutions that meet their growth requirements while simplifying operations, reducing the total cost structure, and quickly adapting to changing business needs," said Richard Villars, vice president, Information and Cloud research, IDC, reflecting on the unified storage phenomenon.

According to Dataquest estimates the total external networked storage market in India (including storage software) grew by 14% to `1,584 crore. (This does not include secondary storage). So with the blurring of lines, vendors took to the market with predominantly unified storage devices and solutions that makes for both NAS and SAN. And that is big way forward for the industry as well and it gives more freedom and choice for the CIOs to create a more robust, efficient storage backbone.

Global Landscape

According to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker Q1 CY12, the worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted an y-o-y growth of 7.1% and stood at $6 bn, in Q1 CY12. Meanwhile the total disk storage systems market posted just under $8 bn in revenues, representing 6.8% growth from the prior year's first quarter. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 6,037 petabytes, growing 20.8% y-o-y.

In Q1 CY12 External Disk Storage Systems vendor performance globally shows EMC maintaining its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 29% revenue share in the first quarter, followed by NetApp in second place with 14.1% market share. IBM is in the third place with 11.4%. HP and Hitachi ended the quarter in a statistical tie for fourth place with 10.2% and 9.4% market shares, respectively.

The Local Dynamics

Given this backdrop if we analyze the Indian market dynamics-like worldwide, there is a clear orientation towards unified storage and the thought was more inclined to a sentiment that instead of a separate NAS or SAN appliance, a converged unified storage box was seen as a better value proposition. As we analyze key vendors, they went aggressive over the last one year on unified storage. In simple terms unified storage offers seamless delivery of block and file storage from one platform. What it means is that enterprises can leverage a single platform for file and block data services. Centralized management makes administration simple. Data efficiency services reduce the capacity requirements up to 50%. So clearly the USP of unified storage lies in its ability to bring a whole deal of storage management functionality on one single device. It's an integrated storage that concurrently supports Fiber Channel (FC), Fiber-Channel-over-Ethernet (FCoE), IP Storage Area Networks (iSCSI), and NAS data protocols. So clearly that's NAS and SAN in one single box. EMC and NetApp were early movers in this space and they made concrete gains riding on unified storage.

EMC, the market leader, adopted a multi-pronged approach and as we look at its strategy over FY12 its unified business grew by more than 27% y-o-y with great traction on the VNXe/VNX; and saw the install base going to more than 460 units. It may be recalled that in 2011 EMC made aggressive forays into the unified storage space by announcing the VNX family designed for virtual data centers and offered a converged solution consisting of its Clarion SAN and Celerra NAS systems into a single, unified family of solutions. The VNX family includes the VNXe entry series with added simplicity for small and medium businesses, and the VNX series, delivering higher performance, efficiency, and simplicity for demanding virtual application environments. And this acted as replacement for EMC's previous Clariion and Celerra product lines. This converged product family combines block and file protocols in a single platform, managed by the new Unisphere management software.

As we look at NetApp another aggressive vendor and one of the pioneer in the unified storage space, it has a range of innovative solutions. For instance, its SANscreen software provides a unified view across and an end-to-end storage environment. It's agentless and heterogeneous, SANscreen delivers real-time visibility across all major storage vendors' platforms. SANscreen automatically correlates the storage infrastructure into a set of "storage services," detects and analyzes the impact of change, gathers real-time and historical performance data from virtual machine to storage device, allows customized reporting that drives all storage operation decisions, and much more. The value pitch NetApp drove home was the message, "With your current legacy environment under control, and with a unified view of both real-time and future data, you can more easily migrate existing applications from legacy architectures to a truly unified storage architecture."

According to Anil Valluri, president, NetApp India, "Storage is becoming an enduring infrastructure layer in IT and commands for a major share in solutions like shared virtual infrastructure, private cloud, and desktop virtualization. NetApp has been delivering technology and product firsts for 20 years and is poised to be the preferred storage technology partner of choice to customers across verticals."

Enterprise storage is the market in which each vendor fights it out literally in terms of revenues and market share. As we look at IBM which gave tough competition to EMC, it topped the Dataquest-CMR Customer Satisfaction Audit (CSA) 2012. Also IBM was one of the fastest growing top 5 external disk storage vendors in India driven by past acquisitions (like XIV) and R&D (Storwize V7000 SONAS). With those assets it made big inroads on the SMB segments as well over the last year. Clearly the sales performance reflects higher customer satisfaction.

IBM also pitched hard its unified storage offering (Storwize V700) and played the storage efficiency game. It harped on such class leading features like the ability of Storwize to compress data by as much as 80% through supported real-time compression for block storage, enabling up to 5 times as much data to be stored in the same physical disk space. Unlike other approaches to compression, IBM real-time compression is designed to be used with active primary data such as production databases and email systems, dramatically expanding the range of candidate data that can benefit from compression. As its name implies, IBM Real-time Compression operates as data is written to disk avoiding the need to store uncompressed data while awaiting compression.

As we look at HDS, it worked on a strategy aimed at abstracting the complexities of the underlying storage environment to create a service-oriented model in which organizations manage storage as a service to their consumers, regardless of the nuances of the underlying physical devices that serve up the storage. Clearly this strategy rode on a fully unified approach.

Meanwhile players like Dell took to market its ‘Fluid Data' architecture that is supported by strong design tenets to create shared values across the portfolio and enable an end-to-end offering with a consistent set of storage characteristics. Dell sources say that it provides value through automated, highly virtualized, and non-proprietary end-to-end solutions, which enable customers to spend less on maintaining infrastructure and more on innovation

From an HP's perspective, it had taken a differentiated approach through its Converged Infrastructure (CI)-this is an eco-system based approach that gives enterprises an end-to-end depth in managing their IT assets. Over the last year HP's ESSN's division had taken a cross-selling inter-collaborative approach for making the CI piece work. It has also embarked on a converged storage play with strategies like ‘Store 360' announced at its 2011 Discover event clearly manifests its intent to go forward with a unified storage paly as we move forward.

HP's storage business is witnessing a strong momentum and armed with a slew of products like 3PAR, IBRIX, StoreOnce and LeftHand. HP is determined to give a very tough competition to EMC, IBM and Dell in FY13. Industry observers say that since HP is pitching storage along with CI, makes its aggression manifesting into real deals across segments during FY13

Road Ahead

According to industry experts, organizations today are creating, leveraging and storing more information than ever before. According to experts, by 2020, data will grow to 35 zetabytes; 44 times the amount of digital information stored today. Business will be responsible for 80% of this information and as IT organizations upgrade their technology infrastructures, 2x the amount of data will be created during the process.

Clearly data is growing and many of it is unstructured and we have reached a stage of intelligence management and hence increasingly the market is moving form a multiple storage silos (in certain cases) to one unified platform. What is interesting is that we are standing at the threshold of many disruptive trends like big data, cloud adoption in the real sense, and analytics. All these are closely tied with storage and hence all vendors keep innovating in this space. In all, one can see a tough battle for market share with players like HP upping its share significantly. Dell is also expected to make significant inroads with its storage offerings.