The 3 Musketeers of 2006

The triumvirate of compliance conformance, virtualization and

information lifecycle management (ILM) has emerged as the most important trends

defining the adoption of storage techniques by Indian enterprises. Compliance

conformation finally came out of vendor marketing pitches in 2006 and started

getting mainstream. The need for storing information for long periods and then

retrieving it at short notice while adhering to regulations gave an impetus to

the storage market around compliance. Almost all major storage vendors eyed this

market as they considered it to be of huge potential for them. Many Indian

companies with business dealings in the US have been mandated to comply with the

Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Basel II, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, EU Data Protection Act,

HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11 (life sciences) and DoD 5015.2 (government). Though

adherence to regulations is derived out of business needs rather than government

edicts, the situation is changing as compliance regulations evolve.

Major storage vendors have designed a well-defined strategy to

tap this emerging market. Demand for compliance-related solutions is on the

rise, and growth is expected around storage solutions that cater to this need.

The BFSI and telecom segments are expected to adopt newer compliance-based

solutions in India. Many potential customers are seriously evaluating the need

for such solutions as issues like corporate governance (which entails storing of

data in a proper format) will be affecting companies. The recent introduction of

the Cheque Truncation System by the Reserve Bank of India, which means storing

the digitized images of cheques in a proper format, started to drive the

adoption of compliance-based storage solutions in the country.

Enterprise content management also became imperative for

enterprises in India, driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including

structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information which grew by

approximately 50% during the year. Of all enterprise information, over 80% of it

was still unstructured, and a bulk of it was not managed. Regulations compelled

organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise

to content management challenges. The various data theft scandals in the BPO

industry also made BPO outfits carefully analyze their data storage and security

strategies. Hence, given the content management challenges, enterprises need to

look at adopting well-defined and well-planned content management strategies in

association with experts in the field.

Virtualization Reality



Many enterprises in India climbed into the bandwagon of storage
virtualization in 2006. Storage virtualization as a concept has been existing

for a long time, but started finding takers in India on a large scale. Storage

pooling, data migration and replication were some of the virtualization

technologies commonly used in SAN. The management of storage devices could be

tedious and time-consuming. Storage virtualization helped the storage

administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily,

and in less time, by disguising the actual complexity of the SAN.

This was part of the trend towards utility computing. It

included the server, OS, application, network and storage. Historically, storage

has always been virtualized, as when a physical device is carved up into logical

devices. Now there is virtualization across the storage systems into larger

aggregated resources. Enterprises in India now need to store more information

and more types of information than ever before. They also need to ensure that

this information is safely retained for rapid recovery and better corporate

governance. IT executives responsible for acquiring and maintaining the storage

systems that hold all this information also face continued pressures to restrain

spending and boost operational efficiency.

Enterprises started reflecting new concerns for simplicity,

effective storage utilization, manageability, and availability of storage.

Storage virtualization allowed IT departments to easily deploy tiers of storage

based on specific application requirements for performance, capacity and

cost-effectiveness. It facilitated unified data replication so that IT managers

can easily migrate or move data between different types of storage, including

legacy systems. It also helped to automate provisioning, expansion, and data

protection tasks across heterogeneous storage systems to boost IT administrators'

overall efficiency.

Virtualization in storage ensured maximum storage capacity

utilization and kept business-critical data and mission-critical data in tiered

storage. Virtual RAID, and virtual snapshot and snap clones automated arrays

considerably. Broadly speaking, storage virtualization has resulted in better

storage utilization. Enterprises have been able to save storage costs by

increasing the utilization of their storage disks, which is a significant

increase at more than 50%. BFSI, telecom and the energy verticals led the way in

adoption.

ILM Provides Direction



Information Lifecycle Management or ILM has been another buzzword of storage
vendors that too moved out of the hype cocoon during the year. ILM came up more

as a market direction for storage. It was a direction that the entire storage

industry started moving in, much as the case was with network storage over the

previous two years. Implementing ILM means a lot of effort in identifying and

categorizing business data which is often a specialist's job. Storage vendors

therefore eyed revenues through consultation services for implementing ILM.

Enterprises gradually adopted ILM strategies to protect

corporate and intellectual property information. Depending on the criticality of

data, organizations keep on fine-tuning their strategies. Telecom, insurance,

government institutes and banks were the main takers. ITC in Kolkata, Tata Elxsi

for their visual computing lab in Bangalore, Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad and

Mumbai, and Hutch across India are all now practicing different stages of ILM.

ILM is a process, which recognized that information has a

lifecycle. It now links the storage utility to applications and enables the

control and intelligent management of information. It also controlled the

movement of data across storage technologies from high-performing disks to

mid-range disk systems to tape to optical. ILM enabled intelligent index, search

and retrieval of relevant information to comply with business policies and

government regulations.

Team DQ