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Follow UsThe data storage industry is one of the most dynamic sectors in
information technology today. Largely, due to the introduction of
high-performance networking between servers and storage assets, storage
technology has undergone a rapid transformation as one innovation after another
has pushed storage solutions forward. At the same time, the viability of new
storage technologies is repeatedly affirmed by the rapid adoption of networked
storage virtually by every large enterprise and institution. Businesses,
governments, and institutions today depend on information, and information in
its unrefined form as data ultimately resides somewhere on storage media.
Milestones
The evolution of the storage industry can be divided in terms of three major
milestones. It originated with the mainframe, which was a gigantic computer that
could run all the programs in a large business. All the computer stuff was
gathered in one place called a data center. All the storage that the mainframe
needs was directly connected to it./dq/media/post_attachments/0001ceb67dfa07e28c40de487bbbb129cda6aa13975e9c0b7b8b52f0e81f7ee4.jpg)
The PC revolution helped data to spread out and was moved off
the mainframe and stared in sewer computers in the 80's. The servers were then
dispersed throughout the enterprise to bring computing power closer to the
actual users. This came to be known in the industry as DAS where the hardware is
connected to an individual server.
Post DAS, storage moved to the next level in the early 90s when
a network or LAN connected servers. A great deal of data was scattered, and
managing all the data dispersed throughout the network became a nightmare. This
saw the advent of SAN in the mid-nineties. NAS, a variation of SAN, came into
the picture in early 2000. Today 70-75% of the storage market is ruled by SAN or
NAS or variation of the two.
Since the early 90s, storage innovation has produced a steady
stream of new technology solutions, including Fibre Channel, network-attached
storage (NAS), server clustering, serverless backup, high-availability dual-pathing,
point-in-time data copy (snapshots), shared tape access, storage over distance,
iSCSI, CIM (common information model)-based management of storage assets and
transports, and storage virtualization.
A Growing Market
Today, storage requirements are driven increasing volumes of data, a growing
understanding that all data needs to be protected and most importantly,
compliance. According to industry sources, while data is growing at around
50-60% globally, this data is growing at the pace of 80-100% y-o-y in India.
Last year, the external storage market grew by 39% while storage
software grew by 38%. The overall network storage market grew at a phenomenal
pace of 85% while DAS registered a negative growth of 18%. The SAN market grew
at 90% while NAS grew at 68% in FY 2005-06. According to IDC, FY 2005-06 storage
hardware revenue in India grows from $231 mn to $279 mn.
| Storage Snapshot |
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About the undergone a rapid transformation as one innovation after another has pushed storage solutions forward. Today, network storage is primarily dominated by SAN, NAS and variation of the two. Tape drives have also done fairly well in secondary storage. Range of Market Offerings: All large external storage vendors offer solutions across categories of external storage. Then there are solutions around services around activities like storage consolidation and newer technologies storage virtualization. Tape solutions have been equipped with advanced features like WORM (Write Once Read Many) is gaining prominence in addition to a hybrid solution that combine disk and tape solutions. Main Features: Storage solutions in offer are largely categorized disaster recovery/business continuity solutions; enterprise content management solutions; email management solutions; content addressed storage (CAS) solutions and IP based storage. CIO's Checklist
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Last year, an interesting trend that picked up was the adoption
of Fiber Channel (FC) SAN in the enterprise considered to be expensive hitherto.
More than 90% of the SAN deployments in enterprise storage for block level
storage access requirements were in the FC category.
Secondary storage grew at a more conservative pace of 11%. Says
Jim Simon, marketing director, APAC, Quantum, "Enhancements in tape has
kept pace with the dynamically evolving storage requirements in the
enterprise." Tapes can enjoy a lifespan of up to 30 years as compared to an
optical disk which can depreciate in quality in about five years time. Huge
demand in tapes as storage devices in India can be assessed from the 8.1% CAGR
growth over six years according to IDC. Storage software kept pace with external
storage market to grow at 38%.
Vendor Landscape
Some of the key players in the market in external storage include big names
like HP, IBM, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Network Appliances, among others.
Today, even storage players like NetApp and EMC have started
providing services around storage. Says PK Gupta, director of product marketing,
APJ and Korea at EMC, "Third party players are also active in the services
around storage segment."
The secondary storage market in India is driven primarily by HP,
IBM and Quantum. Sun Microsystems post its acquisition of StorageTek, also
entered in to this space. Players like Quantum have introduced DLT-V4 drive for
preventive and predictive diagnostic manageability.
Finally, as storage consolidation gains momentum, storage
virtualization is seeing adoption in large enterprises. While enterprises are
adopting storage virtualization at the SAN level, SMB where the trend is far
less significant has been adopting storage virtualization at the server level.
Bhaswati Chakravorty
bhaswatic@cybermedia.co.in