Network Storage Awakening

In terms of storage, it is only in the last one year that the Indian industry has begun to be educated on enterprise storage and its benefits. Says Srinivasan, "Hitherto, only server-based storage held its ground, which the more mature economies and markets have moved out of. Unless the customer understands the benefit of storage infrastructure, they will continue to invest in server-based storage. Also the need to examine storage from a total cost of ownership aspect rather than just the cost of procurement, is a mindset that will evolve quite soon". With the need within enterprises for efficient storage of data and resource-sharing, there is a paradigm shift from direct-attached storage to networked storage, and more and more customers prefer networked storage—be it either NAS or SAN. NAS seems to be popular wherever there is a file-server requirement. "Moreover, heterogeneous platforms demand a NAS solution, as it offers better price performance", claims Panda. Adarsh Holavanahalli, director, corporate architecture, Sanrise, adds, "India is a marketplace where the customer wants to maximize his resources. Though on-site facilities management is a growing trend, customers now prefer one console, one software, one management for all—approach for everything in IT including storage".

Storage architecture: Points out Khan, "DAS, NAS and SAN, are the current storage technologies available in the market. DAS works for small setups and becomes a management nightmare in larger setups. Storage gets fragmented and islands of information on different servers make for either under-use of capacity, or even worse, loss of application and/or performance. Taking backups becomes arduous, time-consuming and costly. NAS is limited to niche applications and is ideal for access applications. It is a file-level consolidation and as far as it is used just for file storage and retrieval, as opposed to transactional manipulation, it is a good solution. However, it has some concern areas, such as lower performance levels, low data security and susceptibility to hacker attacks. It may also reduce the performance of LAN to which it might be attached in the absence of a separate segment for its usage. SAN is ideal for most uses. It caters to medium and large enterprises, with requirements of medium to high throughput and high levels of data integrity. Deploying SAN systems can be slightly more complex and comparatively more expensive as compared to NAS. However, the advantages in the long run outweigh initial expenses in deploying a SAN.

PK Gupta, director of engineering, Legato Systems India Pvt Ltd sums it as "People are talking about iSCSI, Storage over IP, Infiband, Virtual Interface (VI), Storage Resource Management (SRM), storage virtualization, and finally storage consolidation".

He further adds a point of view from his top management in Legato.

"If we look out next year, one of the critical areas that users will deal with is consolidation. This is consolidation of storage, servers and applications. They are going through this for a number of reasons. They save costs because they reduce the amount of wasted storage and servers. One of the keys to storage consolidation is storage networks.  I refer to them as storage networks because I am not tying this specifically to SAN, which implies fiber channel as the means to connect them. The storage will be networked, but it will include NAS devices, SAN and new technologies, such as Infiniband (being aggressively pushed by Intel) or SCSI over IP.  By having networked storage, you have more freedom to use available space for the appropriate server or application. The next step will be storage virtualization. This means that all I need to do is request additional storage for a server or application, and it will take it from the pool of available storage on the network, the storage does not need to be in the same file system, volume or even in the same disk enclosure. This will greatly enhance the ability to allocate storage as needed, without the purchase of extra TB of storage to have on hand.  There will also be a much less wasted storage. Onto the next key area, which is management of storage.  Again, for many of the reasons highlighted above and because it will take users a long time to transition all of their environments to storage networks, and even longer to get to virtualized storage, there is a strong need for tools known as SRM. These tools help in determining storage capacity, such that you know where you are, asset management, configuration management and many other features important for knowing about what the state of your storage environment (which may be attached to many servers) is.

Finally, the other area that is critical is—information availability.  I use the term information, as you need both your data and application to be available.  There is more and more need for immediate or at least, very fast recovery from a failure. As for data availability, you still need tape backup in case of data corruption, but you also need the data to be available online for rapid recovery.  It is managing this combination of data protection schemes that will be critical over the next twelve to eighteen months".

Per MB spending to manage data: There are no concrete responses. Says Khan, "It is difficult to say however, based on the worldwide findings, a roundabout estimate in India would be of the total amount a user spends in the first three years on their storage, just about 15 to 30 percent is accounted for by the initial solution cost, even in the most expensive storage solutions". Panda believes that cost varies from Rs 5 to Rs 50 according to the storage subsystem. Once the storage capacity goes ?? the ‘per MB’ prices lowers. This is for ‘Disk Subsystem’. Adarsh Holavanahalli feels Indian customers spend about 2 cents an MB to manage data today.