No one wants to miss the emerging storage market opportunity in the country. In the last year, be the players form the tradition IT backdrop like Compaq, HP, IBM, and Sun, or the pure-play storage players like Network Appliance, EMC, Hitachi, StorageTek, and Quantum, along with the other storage software management solution providers, all have pledged to grow the marketplace here. Rather fight for the market shares. And the rage at the global marketplace seems to be trickling down the country.

Though it is only now that NAS and SAN solutions seem to get embraced, a new chaos seems to have suddenly engulfed the customers, adding to the already existing doubts regarding solutions. The doubts earlier in mind were what are the things that need to be factored while making a buying and implementation decision. If availability, reliability, scalability, backup, etc, were issues on one hand, the mind blocks on the other hand were which solution (SAN or NAS) and what product, to go for. And the new dimension has caught many doubts strapped—that of mergers and acquisitions, new strategic alliances, and new products. Most of the developments came to the forefront in the last quarter itself.

Take for example, the merger of Compaq and HP. Globally, the merged organization’s enterprise-storage revenue is estimated to be over $ 6 billion. Globally, the new entity’s revenue is close to that of EMC. In India, the combined revenue would be over Rs 350 crore, the total TB shipment would be over 660, and the joint market share is estimated to be close to 60 percent. At the face of it, these figures would be any competitors’ envy. But the customer today is confused. Competitors and few potential customers cite "HP has a partnership with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and sells the latter’s high-end storage arrays. Compaq has a tie-up with IBM. It sells high-end storage arrays, Shark. Further, for its grip on the storage virtualization arena, HP has acquired StorageApps. And Compaq is building its own virtualization product". Also, Hitachi had also entered into a similar agreement with HP. Now the question is can there be stoic between Sun and HP who are competitors?"

Since these have been a result of recent developments, the market appears to be in a state of chaos to the customer. We believe that like any other industry, which goes through a start-up phase, consolidation phase, and maturing phase, the dust will settle down, and the end-customer will be benefactor. Another factor that also assumes significance is that the market in India is still in a very nascent stage and there is not much fuss to be made about that. However, we are beginning to see other vendors who are rigorously aggressive to thrive in the chaos, in all the three tiers of the market— high-end tier, mid-tier, and the low-end tier.

In July 2001, HDS, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, announced its entry into the Indian market with the opening of an office in Bangalore. Then in August 2001, came the announcement of Sun-HDS agreement. As per which Sun would distribute certain high-end HDS products, cross-license and distribute each other’s storage software, and both companies will collaborate on the development of storage software and will work on to expand integration capabilities worldwide. In addition, Sun and HDS will work on expanding their joint-supplier relationship, and invest jointly in mission-critical support centers. "This relationship is shaping up well in India too", says V Vivekanand, business development manager, HDS. This relationship looks to augur well for HDS, as it has been a late entrant as compared to its other major global competitors. Primarily because Sun is very well entrenched in the Indian customers mind, and its relationship and reach within the country, can push up HDS.

Meanwhile in the first week of September 2001, EMC announced the launch of new products and technologies, which it terms as storage hyper consolidation. "Hyper-consolidation of information is the only way for businesses to get more out of their critical assets while requiring fewer people to manage them", remarked Joe Tucci, CEO, EMC. The foundation of the new products and technologies is the architectural continuity of EMC’s Symmetrix Information Storage Systems. It announced Symmetrix 8830, which can handle 69.5 terabytes of information, with the throughput, capacity, and connectivity; Symmetrix 8530 which delivers the capacity and performance of the previous generation high-end Symmetrix in a single-bay, single floor-tile unit; and Symmetrix 8230, which delivers full Symmetrix performance and functionality in the smallest footprint ever for the entry-level enterprise environment. Further, it introduced its CacheStorm technology into all Symmetrix systems, which drastically reduces cache-queuing and the resulting system latency.

Similarly, Network Appliance, which is a leading provider of NAS solutions in the country, announced its march towards high-end storage solutions. It launched its first multi-processor storage appliances—NetApp F880 and F880c—which are claimed to be ideal for large databases, ERP, corporate-wide home directory consolidation, and other mission-critical applications. The F880 and F880c supporting up to 18 TBs of storage. The move towards high-end storage filers brightens its market opportunities. Its earlier appliances, such as F840, are more commonly used for lighter jobs like storing e-mail. During the same period, Quantum announced the acquisition of key complementary technology, intellectual property, and other assets of Connex, in all-cash deals valued at $ 11 million and integrate them into its wholly-owned subsidiary Snap Appliances, manufacturer of the industry standard in workgroup NAS solutions, and also announced to promote its Snap Server products with OTG Software’s DiskXtender 2000 software, to deliver a scalable NAS aggregation solution.

These were just a few of the many such developments which point out to the fact that there will be consolidation, new alliances, and newer products on the anvil. And there is no denying in the fact that customers will stand to gain and the move will be towards open standards and inter-operability.

Who Makes Network Storage?

Cisco, Nortel and Lucent, say we provide storage solutions. Veritas, Legato, and Computer Associates, too, declare the same. Hitachi says we are proud to be associated with Brocade, McData, and Sanrise. Segate and Maxtor, also, say we are into storage. The list can go on. And everyone claims to be the leader. Is there any classification or are they manufactures or do they provide similar products? There are both hardware and software companies in storage. A quick sampling and discussion with various vendors point out that disk capacity, data protection, and connectivity are the three key attributes in storage.

A typical storage solution consists of host-connectivity devices, inter-connectivity devices, subsystems, and software. Host-connectivity devices essentially link the servers and the rest of the storage network. They are primarily adapters—Ethernet adapters and fiber channel host bus adapters. Ethernet adapters are most frequently used to connect the server to a LAN. Fiber channel is the current favorite for SAN applications. There are new devices like SCSI over IP (iSCSI) and Infiniband, which are also coming up.

Inter-connectivity devices help connect large servers and users directly to storage subsystems. These are similar to the conventional networking devices. Their world includes hubs, switches, gateways, routers, etc. Further, development on switches and routers to address IP-based storage is also on. Bridges, gateways and routers, support network connections running different protocols. Storage subsystems basically include disk arrays of various types and architectures, tape arrays, and libraries and data storage systems. Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) are in vogue. Every major systems vendor is into it. Then there is backup like tape arrays, for example, DLTtape from Quantum Corp and Linear Tape Open (LTO) which is a joint effort of HP, IBM, and Seagate Technology.

So the solution providers like Adva AG Optical Networking, Nortel and ONI Systems, manufacture optical networking platforms with SAN interfaces. Brocade Communications Systems, EMC, Inrange Technologies, McData, QLogic, and StorageTek are into fiber channel switches and hubs. Entrada Networks and Lucent Technologies Inc make WAN/SAN gateways. McData and Qlogic make fiber channel storage directors. Makers of storage servers and NAS filers include EMC, Network Appliance, and Quantum; manufacturers of fiber channel adapters include Emulex and LSI.

Software is another important part in both implementing and operating a storage network. And with virtualization being a key to handling complexities of configuring storage, and coordinate with servers with different operating systems and having incompatible file system structures, storage software will be the real thing. The software includes protocols and management—SAN, NAS, Enterprise Systems Management (ESM), data management, and resource management, among many other things. Every SAN and NAS vendor has management software in its system and plug-ins for other software. Before data can be stored on the storage subsystems comprising the storage network, the devices need to be configured. Then there is software that manages the data itself like the backup and restore software that integrates with the tape library systems. For example, Legato Systems and Veritas Software specialize in data protection and high availability.

Ch. Srinivas Rao with inputs from Ravi Shekar Pandey