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Over the past few years, large enterprises have invested heavily in storage resulting in the creation of isolated pools or 'islands' of storage. They are now looking at consolidation that would allow them better utilization of capacities, better performance, and ease of management.

Storage has been one premise of IT where the Indian enterprises are willing to and also spend liberally, but not copiously yet. According to V&D100 estimates the total network storage market in India in FY 2004–05 stood at Rs 430 crore. SAN and NAS contributed Rs 270 crore and Rs 100 crore respectively to the total. Standalone shipment of network storage software was in the range of Rs 55 crore.

India is very much at the forefront of new technology introduction and as it is integrating with the world economy, enterprises in India are becoming early adopters of global tech trends.

Ever spiraling data volumes, increasing regulatory compliance and the growing value of data is also driving adoption of concepts like information lifecycle management (ILM). Typical backup windows are also shrinking, increasing adoption of technologies like 'virtual tape', that allows emulated magnetic tape storage on physical magnetic disks. Increasing criticality of data and dynamic social and business environment is forcing more and more enterprises to deploy disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. All leading vendors like EMC, HP, NetApp, Sun, IBM, and HDS recorded high growth figures for their SAN and NAS offerings.

What's Your Choice?
FC-SANs constitute more than two-thirds of the overall SAN market in India. While FC SANs thrive, the emergence of IP SANs tilted the scales. IP SAN deployments across enterprises including SMBs accelerated the move away from DAS-the traditional storage at enterprises. As IP-SANs use the iSCSI protocol, they offer SAN like functionality over industry standard TCP/IP and Ethernet. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI facilitated data transfer over intranet. Therefore, iSCSI was amongst the key technologies that helped SAN deployments to filter to small and medium enterprises.

There was a kind of stagnated spending in the high-end market segment as most like the BFSI, Telco, ITeS have already heavily invested in the scalable storage solutions. More and more spending has been from the mid-tier, which could again be demarcated as upper and lower mid-tiers.

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, country manager, Intransa, India says, "IP-SAN is increasingly being preferred as a storage solution of choice by wide variety of customers across industry verticals including manufacturing, telecom, media, BPO, Software development, etc." Some of Intransa's IP SAN customers include Spice Telecom, HCL Technologies, Wipro Spectramind, L&T, Grasim Industries, Quintilles, Rediff, Sunpharma, etc.

IP-SAN finds favor with telecom companies for disaster recovery and nearline-data protection. "IP-SANs are entering a new phase and have now become a serious alternative to FC-SANs," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

SMBs Scouting Actively
SMBs have been actively spending-though conservatively-which according to an AMI-Partners report, was at Rs 116 crore for DAS and Rs 74 crore on network storage. Most vendors have revised their products and strategies and customized them to the burgeoning demands and needs of the Indian SMB market.

For Tom Zack, VP, marketing and operations, Asia-Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, the middle tier market is growing at 40 percent and they have to address the lower mid tier market through products that are low in cost with high availability and rich functionality. Also for the first time in Sun and HP's product history-they are selling HDS' mid-tier storage solution.

Almost every vendors has been selling SAN or NAS or a combination of both to the SMB segment across the industry. HP enjoyed the leadership in the SMB storage market, and aggressively promoted products and programs focused on this segment. There was growing competition coming from vendors like EMC, HDS, and NetApp who also got aggressive in the market. The growth in the SMB segment was ascribed to growth in the number of users, expanding business network and those of partners with whom they transact.

Another important aspect was the realization of CRM and its implementation and increased spending on applications like ERP. Increased levels of security awareness, and need to create data back up and recovery solutions gave an impetus to storage. Rahul singh, marketing manager, StorageWorks Division, HP India opines, "there is a visible trend towards network attached storage and automated back up in SME. SMEs, in the absence of full-fledged IT departments, are looking at ease of operations where, for instance, backups are auto-scheduled and continue to happen in the background, maybe over the weekend. A sea change from the current-day scenario where people may be running around all night with tape cartridges."

Evolving Market
Gone are the days when vendors pushed vanilla storage boxes, today the need is for specialized storage solutions. Earlier server vendors like HP and IBM used to sell storage boxes with their key offerings. Globally, market players realized the need for specialization and strategy change. As a result, EMC, the early bird, led the pack globally with NetApp and HDS also faring pretty well. However the earlier stalwarts HP, IBM, and SUN did not really strike gold.

As the storage industry in India is shifting from DAS model to a networked storage model, it is increasing the focus on software and services integrated in the solutions. EMC is a successful study where it changed its market strategy from 70 percent hardware and 30 percent software and services in FY 2003–04 to 47 percent hardware and 53 percent software in FY 2004–05. NetApp also benefited from its two SIs-Wipro and Apara.

Veritas picked up Rs 50 crore-43 percent of the market-through its various solutions for e-mail archiving, clustering, backup etc.

Storage solution providers today are taking the application-oriented approach towards IT infrastructure. This approach is more in line with the business processes of the organizations and ensures that the right solution is put forth for an enterprise. According to Shuja Mirza, technical consultant-India, Brocade Communications Systems, "IT infrastructures today are evolving as competitive tools, rather than just processing power for batch jobs or electronic storage media pools. This approach aligns the IT plans with the business objectives of the organization."

Disaster Recovery Augments Storage Needs
Disasters happen all the time and businesses that can best survive are those that win. To ensure survivability, businesses must have disaster recovery program and infrastructure in place. Vaidyanathan R Iyer of Intransa says, "In this day and age of ROI, IT managers must think of the basic and critical business objectives of a DR program and infrastructure. IP-SAN serves nearline data protection needs."

Businesses know that controller-based replication is a time-tested solution for disaster recovery. But what few people understand is the different types of replication and how it meets their needs.

Many IT organizations today are challenged with moving their online and nearline data to offline tape backups and archives. The requirement for 24x7 application uptime dramatically shrinks the 'backup window'. Yet the data volume on the multitude of servers, desktops, and laptops continues to grow at a rapid rate. While tape arrays and incremental backup solutions help achieve shorter backup windows, they are often complex and costly both for backup and restore. Many IT organizations cannot afford such solutions. As a result, much of the data in many enterprises is not backed up regularly, if at all.

For the data that is backed up, the latency of restoring data from tape is usually long. If the backup log (i.e. the catalog) is maintained online and the data maintained in a tape library, restoring the data may take many minutes. Otherwise, it could take hours, and perhaps days to retrieve the tape from an offsite vault before data can be restored. Obviously, this takes too long for most organizations.

To address these challenges, IT departments are now deploying low cost, cost-effective ATA disk arrays as a staging area, either as a front-end to a tape library or as a stand-alone appliance on the network.

This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts and effectively eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables the backup servers and the associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further cost savings. In a similar vein, the StorControl facilitates the backup of desktop/laptop user data, addressing one of the most significant challenges for today's enterprise IT organizations.

Majority of Indian Companies are looking at building DR capabilities by utilizing their existing Ethernet infrastructure and already available IP skill sets of their IT technicians.

Minu Sirsalewala