The Myths and Realities: The most prominent myth that one encounters is that storage subsystems are expensive but do not deliver the functionalities. Affirms Khan, "SANs can cost a crore and often much more than that, however today, SANs
start at Rs 7 lakh.". Further, the solution providers allay the fears by saying that there are a lot of R&D dollars that are spent to deliver the best of solutions to customers. Most of the storage companies are focusing on a lot of software solutions that deliver the functionality to the storage device. Another myth is that new storage systems are very difficult to manage. "In fact, SANs and NAS reduce storage management costs greatly. They have all the management utilities and plugs that allow them to be easily managed", says Alvin Ow, regional SE manager, Veritas Software Corp. (Refer management costs chart).

Chandrasekhar adds another dimension, "Clinging to legacy storage solutions of backend, SCSI disk drives and front-end fiber channel is a myth, and advocates that end-to-end switched fiber with three-dimensional scalability like the T3 storage solution from Sun is a reality". Khan points out to another myth that bigger is better. Says Khan, "Several people still believe that mainframes are the systems of choice for today and tomorrow, so do several people that the bigger the storage system, the better. The fact of the matter is that it is much better for any user, unless on mainframe systems, to go in for modular storage systems that can grow with their needs. This way they can benefit from newer and cheaper technologies in their growth phase ".

The Issues: Avijit Basu of HP points out, "From the backup point-of-view, it is how much data capacity, backup, and restore window, existing network bandwidth, applications, frequency of backup, type of backup-full, differential, incremental. Are they looking at backup consolidation? Are they looking at backup over a network, consolidation? Are they looking at automation in tape, etc?

From the data spread over the enterprise—Are you looking at business continuity? Is outage a problem, your applications are mission-critical, you cannot afford any downtime. Is managing data a problem? The storage is distributed, no one knows where free storage is available. How does one manage the growth from multiple physical devices from a single logical management point? Is data so critical, you are looking at disaster-recovery system? Is bandwidth an issue? Another big challenge is that the type of data is changing from simple application like e-mail (text to rich media attachment), a two hour normal NTSC video, 3D movie, a high-resolution color still photo or a two-minute audio, occupy from 20 MB to a few TB.