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Most telecom service providers today handle data running into terabytes, thanks to subscriber base touching millions, data services, TV on mobile etc. With this burgeoning storage, telecom enterprises have realized the importance of storage solutions in their overall IT architecture.

According to V&D 100 estimates the total network storage market in India in 2004-05 was about Rs 430 crore. The storage market is expected to grow at 65 percent in the future and telecom would be a major contributor to this growth. The Information storage and management requirements have evolved and have seen double digit growth over the last 2-3 years. The increase in storage requirement can be attributed to an array of factors. Deregulation, unified regime, and the dramatic increase in the subscriber base have resulted in the telecom sector being the largest market vertical spending on IT.

Service providers need to constantly attract customers to increase their market share and continue to retain the existing ones. They need to analyze and control customer churn as the cost to attract new customers is much higher than retaining the old ones.

Service providers have also recognized the BI tools as an important part of their IT investment. They have invested in enterprise BI to manage applications like marketing, business and data analysis.

Efficient service is the key to customer retention. This can be done if the service providers have sufficient data on consumer usage patterns and this can be studied, evaluated and improved. By using applications like BI & CRM, service providers such as Orange, BPL Mobile, and Bharti have deployed BI suites and aligned then with CRM and churn management solutions.

Data services as part of the service offerings is one key factor that has amplified the storage needs. Though currently in India the services are still being developed and offered, it has already directed the service providers to demand heavy storage boxes at the backend. Reliance, Bharti, Hutch are among the few who are already offering a portfolio of data services to their customers both retail and enterprise. These data applications consume large space and have to be made available for users to access and execute these applications.

Planning for the Future
Primarily, the data storage requirements pertain to back office applications such as customer data or billing information. The usage is predominantly voice communication. But with technology evolving and movement to 3G and WCDMA, HSDPA taking place, the storage need for these data/multimedia services storage would increase. These applications would include one-way information retrieval from central servers like Internet access or interactive chat among the people while they are on the move or other high-end multimedia requirements, which are generally possible on computers and TV today. Other applications like Video On Demand, video conferencing, m-learning, m-commerce, GPS and loads other are all very space intrinsic and will need huge storage space to be available. Consumers would want to download multimedia games, movies, etc stored on the back end systems of the telecom service providers, the data storage requirements would change at unanticipated rate.

The dynamic nature of the telecom industry where customers not only change their handsets, but also products, services, and vendors way to often, service providers need to devise a storage strategy for themselves. They need to ensure that the data should not uselessly occupy systems. For this, they can retain data for a certain period of time and then remove it from the network. Alternatively, they can take backups of the historical data on tapes and allow only the current data to flow online. There is no need to keep the data on conventional digital storage systems.

What's in Vogue?
Traditionally data storage for most enterprises was DAS. However, as the applications are changing in a market like telecom, companies are increasingly facing the challenge of deploying effective storage infrastructure. The need is to deploy the applications and data on a single, centralized infrastructure, giving better control to the systems or storage administrators.

The industry is moving from DAS storage to SAN, which is mostly used for data-intensive applications. Because SAN works on shared storage space, it ensures simultaneous access to multiple users, thereby offering better data management and resource utilization. The SANs are being further promoted by IP-SANs, which are expected to grab a significant portion of the storage market. iSCSI especially in the telecom vertical is providing a different value proposition to leverage power of Ethernet infrastructure.

This protocol eliminates the need for a separate storage network that functions within its own computing island. IP-based storage fits in seamlessly with the entire data communications infrastructure of an enterprise. Most of them have BI tools as an important part for their IT investment.

The large telecom service providers such as Bharti, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices have gone in for multiple SANs. With their customer acquisition spree continuing unabated, they have generated voluminous data that requires stringent management, along with correct generation of bills. This calls for a well-defined storage architecture and policy in place. Though IP SANs gained ground, fiber channel SANs were still preferred by larger enterprises for their mission critical applications. The perception among large enterprises is that IP SAN is neither as robust nor as secure as fiber channel.

In addition, ILM Strategy and SAN implementation, storage virtualization are also becoming popular among the telcos. Banks and telcos were the early adopters-many of them still had fiber channels for their core applications, but went in for IP SANs as their nearline storage. IP SANs cost nearly the same as tape libraries so the shift to random access for archived data was done at no extra cost; besides, it enabled them to reduce content on online fiber channel. 65 percent of the IP SAN deployments recorded in the country were directly from DAS-typically, organizations which followed the DAS to NAS route still opted fiber channel when they migrated to SAN.

SAN's Virtualization Mechanism
The maturity of storage virtualization as a technology was another factor that helped in the growth of SAN, particularly the traditional fiber channel variety, during the year. While SANs promise superior performance and flexibility, their benefits were outweighed by their complexity.

Many Indian enterprises, nearly 60-70 percent of the ones on SAN, adopted the concept of storage virtualization to take full advantage of the SAN technology. Through storage virtualization, storage devices from several vendors were consolidated into a virtual storage device.

Not only the consolidation of resources, it also allowed policy-based automation as well as automated backups. Virtualized storage was not restricted by the capacity, speed or reliability limitations of physical devices making up the virtual storage pool. This gave customers the ability to choose storage hardware independent of the functionality that they needed from it, and to change it and upgrade hardware without disrupting existing data. Deployments of storage virtualization during FY 2004-05 took place in the BFSI, telecom, and oil and gas verticals. This was logical considering that these sectors were early SAN adopters and, therefore, also the first to realize the advantages of storage virtualization. Their cost savings were significant, and solutions were consistent across platforms.

While new technologies emerged on the horizon, tape continued to be the preferred medium for long-term archiving. India also continued to be a big market for these tape vendors.

Backup and archival software still enjoyed a lion's share that constituted 54 percent of the overall storage software market, however, storage replication software witnessed the maximum growth of 86 percent.

Selecting the Technology
The primary areas of concern when determining which technology to use in a storage infrastructure, is no longer just capacity, performance, and price - the traditional parameters of consideration. Instead, effectively managing storage became a top priority, and it was this area in which enterprises were willing to invest heavily. But the move to focus on storage management was only the first step in what promised to be a two-step dance for storage administrators.

According to different regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, every organization needed to archive its e-mail. As Indian organizations went global, the need to comply with different regulations, and in turn, the need for e-mail archiving was felt. E-mail, document management and instant message archiving were mandatory for regulatory compliance, legal discovery and business continuity practices. In India, the vendors were bullish about the emerging e-mail archival market.

Since storage was till now primarily restricted to DAS (either within servers only or external DAS), it was easier for these server giants to market their storage wares under a single umbrella.

Since most telecom companies operate on heterogeneous platform and their systems need to communicate with other operators also, interoperability is a crucial area of consideration. The systems should also have seamless integration for various applications like billing, CRM, Data warehousing and the likes.

Minu Sirsalewala